The Open edX Conference 2026 is almost here, and this year’s event is bringing together educators, developers, platform teams, instructional designers, learning leaders, and open-source education innovators in Salt Lake City.

For anyone working with Open edX or exploring it for their organization, this conference is more than a calendar event. It is a chance to understand where the platform is heading, what the community is building, and how institutions are using open-source learning technology to support learners at scale.

This guide will help you plan your time, understand the key themes, and identify the sessions worth prioritizing.

Why Open edX Conference 2026 Matters

Open edX has grown far beyond its early identity as a platform for massive open online courses. Today, universities, enterprises, governments, and training organizations use it to build custom LMS platforms, professional training programs, certification pathways, workforce learning ecosystems, and large-scale digital education experiences.

Its biggest strength is flexibility.
Open edX gives organizations more control over how they design learning experiences, integrate tools, customize workflows, scale delivery, and support different learner journeys.
That is why the Open edX Conference matters. It brings together the community who are actively building, using, improving, and shaping the platform. The conversations here are not only about what Open edX can do today, but also about what it needs to become next.

This year, the biggest themes include:

• AI in Open edX

• Skills-based learning

• Competency-based education

• AI-enabled assessment

• Learning paths and learner journeys

• Platform extensibility

• Open edX upgrades and modernization

• Accessibility and inclusive learning

• Data-informed learning design

• Enterprise learning distribution

• Open-source sustainability

Together, these themes reflect where digital learning is moving: toward platforms that are more flexible, more skills-focused, more data-informed, more accessible, and more connected to real learner outcomes.

Event Details at a Glance

Event: Open edX Conference 2026
Dates: May 19–22, 2026
Location: Little America Hotel, Salt Lake City, Utah – USA
Host: Western Governors University
Main focus areas: AI-powered learning, skills-based education, data-informed learning, accessibility, platform modernization, learner experience, and open-source collaboration

The conference will include workshops, keynotes, technical sessions, pedagogy-focused talks, featured sessions, community discussions, networking opportunities, and the Open edX Town Hall.

Sessions to Watch at Open edX Conference 2026

With so many sessions happening across different tracks, it can be hard to decide where to focus first. We’ve put together a list of sessions to help you prioritize based on your interests.

Edly Sessions to Watch at Open edX Conference 2026

Edly will be part of important conversations at this year’s conference, especially around skills-first education, AI-enabled assessment, learner pathways, and new standards for learning activities.

If you are attending Open edX Conference 2026, these sessions are worth adding to your agenda.

Democratizing Durable Skills with Open edX: Building a Skills-First Open Platform

Conducted by: Faqir Bilal – Product Director, Edly by Arbisoft and Tara Laughlin –Senior Director, Skills Visibility | Education Design Lab
Time: Wednesday, 2:00 pm – 2:30 pm

Skills-based learning is becoming one of the most important conversations in education. Learners want programs that help them build real-world capabilities, and institutions need platforms that can support competency-based models at scale.

In this session, Faqir Bilal from Edly and Tara Laughlin from Education Design Lab will share a flagship 2026 Open edX initiative built with Axim Collaborative. The session will explore how Open edX can support durable skills, competency-based learning, Open Educational Resources, and scalable credentials.

This is a valuable session for universities, training providers, workforce learning teams, and education leaders who want to move beyond traditional course completion and design programs around real skills.

AI-Enabled Assessment in Open edX: Lessons for Scale, Pedagogy, and Validity

Conducted by: Faqir Bilal – Product Director, Edly by Arbisoft and Asad Iqbal – Senior Performance & Learning Specialist
Time: Thursday, May 21, 2026, 5 PM

AI is quickly becoming part of digital learning, but assessment is one area where institutions need to be especially careful. It is not enough to automate grading. Assessment still needs to be pedagogically sound, valid, fair, and useful for learners.

In this session, Faqir Bilal and Asad Iqbal will share lessons from enabling, testing, and scaling AI-based assessments in Open edX using an open-source grading tool. The session will cover practical insights around assessment design, human oversight, multilingual workflows, multimodal use cases, and responsible scaling in real educational settings.

For teams exploring AI in Open edX, this session can help separate meaningful implementation from surface-level automation.

Introducing PXC: A New Cross-Platform Standard for Learning Activities

Conducted by: Régis Behmo – VP of Engineering at edly
Time: Wednesday – 4.30 pm – 5.00 pm

Learning activities are at the center of learner engagement. But creating, sharing, grading, and scaling interactive activities across platforms can still be complex.

In this session, Régis Behmo will introduce PXC, a new cross-platform standard for learning activities inspired by SCORM, LTI, H5P, and XBlocks. The session will explore how PXC supports offline usage and sandboxed user-uploaded activity packages. It will also show how users can create and upload new learning activities with the help of generative AI.

This session is especially relevant for developers, platform teams, instructional designers, and l teams interested in the future of interactive learning inside Open edX.

Want to discuss these ideas with the Edly team at the conference?
If you are exploring Open edX for skills-based learning, AI-enabled assessment, custom platform development, upgrades, or learner experience design, we would love to connect.

Schedule a meeting with Edly at Open edX Conference 2026.

Book a Meeting

Keynote Sessions to Watch

Beyond Edly’s sessions, Open edX Conference 2026 will include several featured talks that set the direction for the broader community. These sessions are useful for understanding where Open edX, open-source learning, AI, and skills-based education are heading next.

The National Learning Ledger: Scaling Skills and Economic Mobility

Conducted by: Zelalem Assefa, Javier Pozo, and Lydia Logan

This plenary session will explore how governments, corporations, and national learning initiatives are using Open edX to build large-scale skills pipelines. The session will look at examples such as Santander Open Academy and Uruguay’s Ceibal, showing how Open edX can support national upskilling, data sovereignty, and economic mobility.

For learning leaders and decision-makers, this is an important session because it connects Open edX with workforce transformation and national learning infrastructure.

Collaborate on the Core, Compete on the Edges: The Value and ROI of Open Source

Conducted by: Frank Nagle

Open source is not just a development model. It is also an economic and strategic choice. In this session, Frank Nagle will explore how AI is changing the economics of open-source maintenance and why Open edX can serve as a safe and effective environment for AI-driven learning tools.

The session will also focus on the long-term health of open-source education and why the community needs to move from simply using Open edX to actively stewarding and sustaining it.

From LMS to Learning Factory: Agentic AI in the Course Lifecycle

Conducted by: Javier Pozo

This session will outline how AI agents could support the full course lifecycle, from course creation and delivery to testing and improvement. It also raises an important question for the Open edX community: how can the platform become core infrastructure for a more dynamic, AI-native learning ecosystem?

This is a useful session for teams thinking about AI strategy, course automation, and the future of learning platform design.

Beyond Enrollment: Distribution Patterns for Enterprise Customers

Conducted by: Scott Dunn

For enterprise learning teams, delivering a course is often only one part of the challenge. The bigger question is how to distribute learning into complex customer ecosystems. In this session, Scott Dunn will explore real-world distribution patterns for Open edX operators, including enterprise catalogs, CCX cohorts, APIs, LTI integrations, and SCORM dispatch.

This session is especially useful for organizations using Open edX for customer education, partner training, enterprise learning, or large-scale professional development.

Additional Sessions You Can Attend

Alongside Edly-led sessions and keynote talks, there are many other sessions worth attending depending on your role and goals. To make this easier to navigate, we have grouped them by audience.

For Educators and Instructional Designers

These sessions are useful for teams focused on course design, learner engagement, accessibility, assessment, and learning experience.

Leveraging Content Libraries & AI in Your Courses

Conducted by: Ildi Morris and Felipe Montoya
This session will explore Content Libraries in the Open edX Ulmo and Willow releases. Attendees will learn how to convert a course into a library, think through content reuse and remixing, and explore native AI Extensions such as chatbots, problem generators, and badge generators. It is a strong session for course teams looking for better ways to reuse content and bring AI-supported tools into their courses.

The Rise of Virtual Instructor Led Training

Conducted by: Ildi Morris
Even as self-paced learning continues to grow, live online instruction remains in demand. This session will look at the rise of Virtual Instructor Led Training and how organizations like Pearson use Open edX for live-facilitated technical training. It is useful for teams designing hybrid learning experiences that combine self-paced content with live instruction.

It’s All OLX to Us! Using HTML and XHTML to Make Cool Content at MIT xPRO

Conducted by: Shilpa Idnani
This session will show how course teams can use OLX, HTML, and XHTML inside Open edX to create more customized and creative learning content. It is especially useful for teams that want to build interactive assessments, mini simulations, matching problems, and advanced content directly inside Studio.

Using Content Experiments to Make Data-Informed Decisions About Learning Design

Conducted by: Adam Hill and Lauren Liss
Good learning design should be supported by evidence, not just assumptions. This session will show how Content Experiments in edX Studio can help teams use learner behavior data to improve course design. Attendees will see how A/B testing can support better decisions around tools, formats, and pedagogical approaches.

Digital Accessibility Workshop

Conducted by: Colin Fredericks
This hands-on workshop will help attendees practice making course materials more accessible. Participants will work on writing alternative text for images and selecting accessible color schemes. It is especially useful for course teams with beginner to intermediate accessibility experience.

For Developers and Technical Teams

These sessions are useful for teams working on Open edX customization, extensions, upgrades, frontend development, XBlocks, and platform operations.

One Plugin to Rule Them All: Building Full-Stack Open edX Extensions

Conducted by: Kyle McCormick
This session will focus on full-stack Open edX extensions and the work being done to improve developer tooling and remove obsolete code. It is relevant for teams building cleaner, more maintainable Open edX customizations.

Make It Extensible: Adding Extension Points Where You Need Them

Conducted by: Feanil Patel and Adolfo Brandes
Sometimes the extension point you need does not exist yet. This session will walk attendees through how to create stronger extension points in Open edX. Participants will learn how to add frontend plugin slots, create new events or filters, use Tutor plugins, and understand when changes should be contributed upstream.

Modern XBlock Development: React & Next-Gen Components for Open edX

Conducted by: Fox Piacenti
This session will explore how XBlocks are evolving toward more modern development approaches. It will cover how React and next-generation components can support interactive learning experiences while still working within the existing XBlock API.

Design Tokens: Plugin Slots but for Your CSS

Conducted by: Kaustav Banerjee and Brian Smith
Frontend customization is a major part of building flexible learning experiences. This session will explain how design tokens can support deeper customization in Open edX. Just as plugin slots allow teams to extend MFE content, design tokens can create styling hooks and make customization easier to manage.

From Legacy to Modern Open edX: A Realistic Upgrade Path for Stranded Institutions

Conducted by: Natalia Chocontá and Juan Camilo Montoya
Many Open edX sites are still running on older releases, and upgrading can feel risky or unclear. This session will focus on how institutions can approach modernization through cleanup, compatibility work, staging, cutover, and post-launch stabilization.

The Upgrade Dilemma: Lessons from Real-World Open edX Site Migrations

Conducted by: Fox Piacenti
This session will explore the technical and organizational challenges of upgrading Open edX sites. Drawing from a real migration from Juniper to Sumac, it will cover customizations, integrations, risk management, and resource constraints that make upgrades a serious planning concern.

For Learning Leaders and Decision-Makers

These sessions are useful for teams thinking about platform strategy, skills-based learning, enterprise learning, learner outcomes, and long-term Open edX planning.

Sovereignty at Scale: Verifiable Credentials, Open LERs, and the Future of Learner Agency

Conducted by: Taylor Hansen and Kerri Lemoie
As skills-based hiring grows, learner-owned records and portable credentials are becoming more important. This session will explore Open Badges 3.0, W3C Verifiable Credentials, decentralized identity, and Learning and Employment Records. It is useful for institutions thinking about how learners can carry proof of their skills beyond a single platform.

How Can the Open edX Platform Power Job-Ready Skills Education to Employment?

Conducted by: Mary Gwozdz and Jenna Makowski
This session will focus on how Open edX can support competency-based education, mastery tracking, and job-ready learning pathways. It is especially useful for institutions connecting learning experiences with workforce outcomes.

What We Learned Mapping the Open edX Global Footprint: Global Impact Report 2025–2026

Conducted by: Jorge Londoño and Juan Camilo Montoya
This session will present insights from eduNEXT’s Global Impact Report and show how Open edX is being used across different regions. It can help attendees understand where open education is growing and what challenges different regions are facing.

The Open edX Platform Beyond the LMS: Real Impact in Uruguay

Conducted by: Christian Tapia and Laura Vence
This session will show how Open edX is being used beyond traditional LMS use cases to support broader educational transformation in Uruguay. It is relevant for organizations interested in social impact, community learning, and large-scale digital education.

Solving Problems Together: Community-Driven Platform Development

Conducted by: Cassandra Zamparini and Chelsea Rathbun
This workshop will show how Learning Pathways started as a hallway conversation and grew into a cross-organizational development effort. It is useful for teams interested in community collaboration, roadmap planning, and the way Open edX projects move from ideas to real software.

For Accessibility and Inclusion-Focused Teams

These sessions are useful for teams responsible for inclusive course design, accessibility compliance, and learner support.

From Intent to Evidence: A Practical Accessibility Diagnosis Framework for the Open edX Platform

Conducted by: Laura Vence and Christian Tapia
Accessibility is no longer just about having good intentions. Institutions increasingly need evidence that their learning experiences are accessible. This session will share a practical framework for diagnosing accessibility gaps in Open edX. It will look at where the platform works well, where gaps remain, how responsibility is shared, and how institutions can approach accessibility compliance in practice.

Open edX Through a Screenreader

Conducted by: Charles Okello
This session will bring an accessibility-focused learner and author perspective to Open edX. Charles Okello will share insights from working on inclusive course design, screen readability, and participation in digital education ecosystems.

How to Plan Your Conference Agenda

Once you have shortlisted the sessions that matter most, the next step is to plan your time.
If your team is attending together, it can also help to divide sessions by focus area. One person can follow AI and assessment sessions, another can focus on platform development, while someone else attends sessions around learning design, accessibility, or strategy. That way, your team can bring back a wider set of insights without overlapping too much.

How to Make the Most of Open edX Conference 2026

A good conference experience starts before you arrive. With multiple tracks and sessions happening across four days, a little planning can help you get much more value from the event.

Review the Agenda Before the Event

Do not wait until the conference starts to decide what to attend. Go through the schedule in advance and shortlist sessions based on your role, your organization’s goals, and the problems your team is trying to solve.

Prepare Your Questions

The best conference takeaways often come from conversations after sessions, during workshops, or while networking. Before the event, write down the questions your team is currently trying to answer.
For example:

• Are we planning an Open edX upgrade?

• Do we need better learner analytics?

• Are we exploring AI-enabled assessment?

• Do we want to improve learner engagement?

• Are we trying to support skills-based learning?

• Do we need help with accessibility or compliance?

When your questions are clear, it becomes easier to find the right sessions, speakers, and conversations.

Attend the Open edX Town Hall

The Open edX Town Hall is one of the most important parts of the conference. It gives the community a chance to hear updates, understand future priorities, and take part in broader conversations about the direction of the platform. For organizations serious about Open edX, this is a session worth prioritizing.

Make Time for Community Conversations

Open edX is not just a platform. It is a community. The conference is a chance to meet educators, developers, service providers, platform leaders, contributors, and organizations working through similar challenges. These conversations can help you discover new ideas, avoid common mistakes, and learn from people already solving the problems your team may be facing.

Turn Your Notes into an Action Plan

The real value of the conference comes after the event. Once the conference ends, review your notes and organize your takeaways into three categories:

• Ideas to explore now: Small improvements, useful tools, or new practices your team can test soon.
• Topics to research further: AI features, credentialing models, analytics improvements, accessibility audits, or upgrade planning.
• Long-term roadmap items: Future Open edX strategy, platform architecture, learner experience, integrations, or skills-based learning plans.

This helps make sure the conference does not become just a set of notes, but a source of real improvement.

Final Thoughts

Open edX Conference 2026 is a valuable moment for anyone working in open-source learning, digital education, platform strategy, or learner experience. This year’s agenda reflects where education technology is heading: AI-enabled, skills-focused, data-informed, accessible, extensible, and community-driven.

For educators, the conference offers new ideas for course design and learner engagement.
For developers, it offers practical sessions on extensions, architecture, standards, and modernization.
For learning leaders, it offers a clearer view of how Open edX can support workforce learning, credentials, enterprise programs, and large-scale education strategy.

And for the Edly team, it is an opportunity to contribute to some of the most important conversations shaping the future of Open edX, from durable skills and AI-enabled assessment to learning paths and next-generation learning activity standards.

Whether you are attending in person or following the updates from afar, Open edX Conference 2026 is worth watching closely.