Learn Complex Skills, From Anywhere: Combining Django, Ansible and OpenStack to teach any tech skill

This is a talk I submitted¹ to three separate conferences:

• PyCon AU 2018, via an anonymized CfP process using PaperCall. This submission was rejected.

• linux.conf.au 2019, which used a non-anonymized CfP process on a custom platform that, I think, is built on Symposion. That submission was accepted, and the talk ran in the main conference programme.

• PyCon DE 2019, via a non-anonymized CfP process using pretalx. This submission was rejected.

It’s the linux.conf.au submission that is reflected in this page.

Title

Learn Complex Skills, From Anywhere: Combining Django, Ansible and OpenStack to teach any tech skill

Target Audience

Community

Abstract

This will appear in the conference programme. Up to about 500 words. This field is rendered with the monospace font Hack with whitespace preserved

Professional skill-building is challenging, particularly when the skill to acquire is about distributed, scalable platform technology. In this talk, I cover an open-source skill-building platform that is 100% Python: built on Open edX and heavily involving Django, Ansible, and OpenStack.

The information technology industry is currently dealing with an interesting challenge in professional skill-building: almost every new technology developed in recent years has been complex, distributed, and built for scale: Kubernetes, Ceph, and OpenStack can serve as just a few representative examples. Loose coupling, asynchronicity, and elasticity are just some of the qualities frequently found in such systems that were entirely absent in many of the systems we built only a few years ago. As a result, people comfortable with building and operating these complex systems are hardly found in abundance, and organisations frequently struggle to adopt these technologies as a direct result of this scarcity: we are dealing with a skills gap, not a technology gap.

This means that we need novel ways to educate professionals on these technologies. We must provide professional learners with complex, distributed systems to use as realistic learning environments, and we must enable them to learn from anywhere, at any time, and on their own pace. One excellent way of doing this is to use the capabilities of the Open edX platform to integrate a learning management system with hands-on, on-demand lab environments that can be just as complex, and just as distributed, as production systems. This allows anyone interested to develop a professional skill set on novel technology at minimal cost, and without the need for costly hardware platforms for evaluation.

In this talk, I will give a rapid technical introduction to the core components of this free and open source (AGPL 3/ASL 2) all-Python platform:

• edx-platform, the core learning management system (LMS) and content management system (CMS), built on Django;

• edx-configuration, the automated deployment facility to roll out the Open edX platform, built on Ansible;

• and finally, the Open edX XBlock extension system and its integration with OpenStack, also itself an all-Python cloud platform, in order to provide on-demand lab environments from both private and public cloud environments.

Private Abstract

This will only be shown to organisers and reviewers. You should provide any details about your proposal that you don’t want to be public here. This field is rendered with the monospace font Hack with whitespace preserved

I come from a background in technical consulting and instructor-driven professional education, and together with my team have been building and deploying Open edX based platforms as described in the talk since 2015. I believe I have a good understanding on why instructor-driven training, while desirable, is not accessible to everyone in need of keeping abreast with technology development, and that a self-paced, learn-from-anywhere alternative is needed. I am extremely grateful for the fact that we have an very well-suited platform for that purpose, and since it has a completely open-source, Python codebase, it might be of interest to LCA attendees.

I have done a talk on a similar topic at the LCA 2018 Education miniconf (video link included below). In the 2018 talk, I focused primarily on the educational aspects of self-paced, on-line training. This time, and I think more appropriately for the main conference track, I would like to dive into the nuts and bolts of the platform that drives this. As such, the talk should still be appealing to people engaged in professional education (be it as learners, tutors, or instructional designers), but will also be insightful to Python and OpenStack developers, and heavy Ansible users.

Video URL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8BhTAjMwa4