Edly is known for its many open-source contributions to Open edX. Being one of the oldest and earliest service providers of Open edX technology, Edly has entertained numerous global clients and established itself as a reputed LMS service provider. Having understood the importance of continuously improving the user experience, Edly devotes time and resources to ensuring open-source contributions.

Of the many contributions to Open edX, a notable one is event-routing-backends which is developed as a pluggable application for the edX platform. The application is built on top of the event-tracking app on the edX platform to provide new tracking backends and processors.

With the help of this plugin, edX platform events can be easily filtered and transformed into xAPI and Caliper statements.

How does it work?

The event-routing-backends plugin allows easy segregation of events that are to be transformed with the help of the RegexFilter processor or NameWhitelist processor present in the event-tracking library. While both of these processors run in the main thread, NameWhitelist is faster as it performs simple string comparisons.

The two processors necessary for transforming edX events to Caliper and xAPI formats are CaliperProcessor and xAPIProcessor. However, events that are in Caliper format need Caliper EnvelopeProcessor as well for proper routing.

The transformed events are routed to configured routers with the help of the EventsRouter backend that runs the processors mentioned earlier. 

To learn more about the installation and configuration of this plugin, check out this step-by-step guide.

Benefits of Event-routing-backends Plugin

This pluggable application allows near real-time communication which means now you can transform events emitted from open edX in Caliper/xAPI statements and push them into an adaptive engine. 

Not only this, the plugin supports adaptive learning by developing and sending events to adaptive engines. In addition to this, event-routing-backends has the ability to route Caliper/xAPI-based events from multiple systems to a single LRS. 

Another use case of this plugin is the creation of a data lake or data warehouse of the data coming from multiple sources in a standard format like xAPI or Caliper and then generating valuable insights.

The event-routing-backends open source plugin has proved significant value for edX and is available for the Open edX community to make the most of it. 

Have you used this plugin? Share your feedback with us at hello@edly.io