What's Happening with OpenMRS Professional Development & Academy

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So glad to see the Academy idea coming to fruition!! I was so inspired seeing the CHT Academy and I know we can knock ours out of the park :smiley:

So I clicked the Canva link, and this got me thinking, instead of redesigning layouts from scratch, it might save us a lot of time to use this or similar tooling. So I had some ideas:

  • Can we copy how CHT did it? Answer: No, not easily. Digging into the CHT Academy, I discovered this is not a custom website page - they used the OSS project OpenEdX; specifically, through the vendor distribution called edunext. OpenEdx seems like you either need to set up your own hosted instance (not really something we have bandwidth for I don’t think) or pay a vendor - I wonder how much edunext charged the CHT folks?
  • Is there an alternative that would host our Academy tech/server for us, that others in the industry are using too? Answer, kind of. This donor-funded service would host the content for us, gives us the editing tools, etc. How to Partner with atingi | atingi Collaboration Guide However this looks mostly focused on GIZ-funded projects and I assume we’d be dependent on GIZ continuing to fund atingi. FWIW here’s a sampling of existing materials different orgs are hosting there; they’re not super well aligned with the DPGA/GG industry specifically, and I do find their UI a bit clunky:
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  • The Best of Both: Maybe there’s a better Atingi alternative… this got me thinking, what did OpenHIE Academy use? I inspected their academy and found they used this: https://www.learndash.com/learndash-lms At just $200/year this seems like a good idea - and I especially like that they have ecommerce integration so that would mean expert community Orgs could create OpenMRS Academy content and charge for it, if they really really wanted to.
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BUT maybe I’m misunderstanding the initial goals… @jennifer are you thinking that the website page would just link out to existing links / easily maintainable pages on our Wiki instead? This would definitely be faster to set up and maintain right now. We’d just be missing out on the Quiz/Step-by-Step experience of a course product.

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