What is the crowd's opinion of Open edX?

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Edtech, biotech, healthtech, etc. all pay well and can either be well-paying non-profits (e.g. OpenEdX - a former colleague is there) or, more commonly, for-profits whose interest align with your own. My educational background is in biology and working on healthtech was one of the most motivating areas I’ve worked in in my career.

This isn’t to discount the other suggestions but to provide an avenue that many commenters either dismissed outright or missed.

While I've not touched it in a while, I stood up the EdX platform at one point. Self hosted. Looks like it has matured quite a bit in the past five or so years:

https://open.edx.org/the-platform/

What’s the actual problem you are trying to solve? It sounds like you have something that works, but is difficult to maintain.

1. Have you considered refactoring and cleaning the existing code rather than rewriting?
2. Have you explored existing solutions such as Open edX?

I would start first with understanding the problems you are solving, and any constraints. This will guide you in the selection of tooling.

Objectively speaking SPARTA has barely started so the jury isn't out yet on the experience - but it's handled by Coursebank which uses OpenEdX - so by design it may mimic the experience of those learning platforms. Online training by nature has pros and cons - pros being speed, relative cost, cons can be lack of theoretical depth - most MOOCs are designed to be bite sized more on application and less on theory.

My 2c: YMMV on any training, whether free or paid, online or classroom, formal school or workshops. About as much depends on the learner as it does on the trainers. I think the best way to address your question is to ask yourself what learning approach best applies to you. For example MOOCs can appeal more to video-learners, less on book-learners. From experience in any case, practicing (or re-teaching) what you learned from a training can be a way to help it stick. Better if you have a role or project that actually uses it.

I think the fact that DOST is making this facility available is a big deal in itself since the classroom route can be pricey, especially for some schools. But it's still on the learner if they can finish the offering, and also find application for it.

There are service providers that will get it set up privately or on a cloud service, https://open.edx.org/get-started/.

To answer your question, yes I have installed and used it. But only locally using the Vagrant instructions https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/OpenOPS/pages/60227787/Running+Vagrant-based+Devstack. I did that as part of a job interview at one of the service providers. It's some work to set up but not more work than writing a MOOC application from scratch or even wrangling a CMS into a MOOC.

> offer their own MOOC-platform

Or joining the already existing open-source alternative edX. No need to reinvent the wheel, Stanford already did it.

Have looked at Open edX? The most important part of your courses should be the content for sure, but if you add a good look around it, it will impact your students engagement and learning experience. Open edX, is open source, provides a nice look that is, of course, customizable in their source, on top of that has a very rich API, which can allow you to create a mobile app if that's what you are also looking for. Although I saw a responsive edX a few months ago, so that could also cover you.