The government of Spain is funding a large online learning project, called Uni Digital, to expand the Open edX platform into an on-campus LMS for public Spanish universities and will aid in advancing Open edX features, such as advanced analytics for students, instructors, and researchers; integration with SIS (Student Information Systems), improvements in the Open edX interface and usability, gamification, voice assistants, and a Turnitin integration. All features developed, as a result of this initiative, will be made open source and the code will be merged into the Open edX repositories in GitHub.

Ignacio Despujol, MOOC Initiative Coordinator at Universitat Politècnica de València and former Open edX Technical Oversight Committee member, as well as Felipe Montoya, Co-Founder of eduNEXT, present this E-Learning initiative funded by the Spanish Government, and outline the main areas of improvement, which they aim to target for the Open edX platform. The overall project is quite vast and contains 16 work packages. As a result, the presentation will center around their current efforts in progress listed below:
1. Overhauling the statistical data available to authors and teachers.
- Strategy: Adoption and support of the OARS project.
- Acceleration of development to achieve a stable production version 1.
- Merging over 50 pull requests across all OARS repositories.
- Performance tuning to handle a high volume of events per minute.

2. Creating a more flexible grouping strategy to effectively manage groups of students and teachers within a course in the way it is done at Spanish universities, as well as accommodating other potential grouping strategies.

3. Developing a new file management component that includes folders and advanced file presentation options, similar to the features available in Moodle or Sakai.

Following this presentation, Illia Shestakov, Software Engineer at Abstract Technology GmbH, presents a data security tool called Edxbackup. Edxbackup seamlessly integrates with the data sources utilized by the Open edX platform, which include MySQL, MongoDB, and S3-compatible object storage. The tool efficiently passes on this information to restic, a cryptographic encryption and deduplication software that ensures data security at a remote location. Unlike using restic as a stand-alone solution, Edxbackup offers the added advantage of being conveniently configured by a JSON file. This versatile tool can be integrated into any project leveraging the aforementioned data sources, regardless of whether it is restricted to the Open edX platform or not.

Finally, we share an exciting update, related to the Open edX project. The Open edX platform is owned by Axim Collaborative, formerly known as the Center for Reimagining Learning (tCRIL), the nonprofit started by Harvard and MIT with the proceeds from the sale of edX. Axim Collaborative has onboarded a new CEO, Stephanie Khurana, who will lead the Open edX vision moving forward. Stephanie Khurana assumed her role as CEO of Axim Collaborative on April 3rd of this year and we are excited to introduce her to the community as a whole.

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