As the number of installations we made with Open edX and our contributions to the development of Open edX increased, the inevitable happened. Artistanbul is now an Open edX Verified Provider!
It has been almost 7 years since we first met Open edX, your family’s distance education system…
So, how did we meet Open edX? It’s a long story, but let’s tell it if you don’t get bored.
That unique moment when we realised the difference between Open Source and Open Core
We were working with the Turkcell Zeka Gücü Project (when it first started, it was called Zeka Küpü) and we had chosen the ‘so-called’ open source Canvas LMS as a distance education infrastructure. When our days of ‘cutting each other remotely’ were over, the first few months with Canvas LMS were not bad at all. Canvas LMS looked like a nice tool, the open source community version, the ‘Community Edition’, seemed like it would do the job.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way. Our first big problem with Canvas LMS was when we needed a storefront, that is, a showcase page where the trainings were categorised and sorted. Instructure, the company that developed Canvas LMS, put an invoice ‘starting from 5.000 dollars’ in front of us. Moreover, this was only for the storefront, there were many other features we wanted to add to Canvas.
Our first reaction was ‘Isn’t it open source? We can develop it, we have Python developers like lions!’. But after a while, we would painfully realise that this was not the case… Canvas LMS was developed with an open source licensed kernel (opencore), and almost everything around this kernel was paid and closed source. As if that wasn’t enough, almost none of the API layers to connect Canvas with external tools were available or open! If you say documentation and community support, Canvas LMS was end-user friendly but definitely not ‘developer friendly’.
The monolithic structure of Canvas LMS, which we said ‘Oh, how nice, it installs with one click!’ when we first installed it, was actually doing nothing but making it difficult for us to understand which code does which job. We started to learn painfully that Canvas LMS was not ‘open source’, but a Fremium software developed on ‘open core’…
Open edX and our hair loss
We met Open edX with the suggestion of dear Onur Güzel. ‘Abi, why is the education team dealing with this? There is a completely open source tool called Open edX?’
You know, there is a line: ‘Mr. Judge, at that moment I blacked out and I don’t remember what happened next. I slit my mother-in-law’s throat right then and there, I regret it very much, I demand my acquittal.’… It didn’t happen exactly like that, but that’s how I felt at that moment and for a while afterwards.
Of course, our migration to Open edX was not easy in the beginning. In those days, the title of another developer’s blog post reflected our feelings as a team: ‘Canvas LMS, Open edX and Our Falling Hair’
Fortunately, we were able to master Open edX in the medium term, even mastering it within 1-1.5 years.
Open edX was philosophically and architecturally quite different from Canvas:
- Although the core of both tools was distributed with AGPL, Open edX had open licences such as Apache/MIT for all tools except the core, while the Canvas LMS side was completely closed/owned. Canvas’ ecosystem of 3rd party applications and plugins was based on a seemingly strong but philosophically completely different business model.
- In contrast to Canvas’ monolithic structure, Open edX’s modular architecture made the installation process a bit more difficult, but made it possible to manage the code and understand which component did what.
- Open edX’s community was the kind of ‘open source’ community we are used to. With a Slack channel, a Discuss forum, developer meetups and blog posts, and a rich documentation centre categorised by target audience, we definitely had access to the information and help we needed.
Artistanbul: Open edX Approved Provider
The number of our Open edX installations is increasing day by day. For some time now, our contributions to Open edX in terms of localisation and development have been increasing remarkably. So much so that one of our installations was published as a success story in the Open edX global developer webinar. After a while, the inevitable happened: Artistanbul is now an Open edX Verified Provider!

So, what does it mean to be an Open edX Verified Provider?
As a top-level solution partner of Open edX, our commitment to Open edX and the community has grown tremendously. A certain part of our team will only work on Open edX projects, we will start to work more closely with Open edX’s core teams and even become part of them after a while.
If you want to be a part of this enormous ecosystem and enjoy an open source education platform used by giants such as MIT, Stanford, Harvard, we welcome you to join us!