A particular feature of online courses is that their quality is based not only on their content and the teaching abilities of their creators. It also depends crucially on the technological status of the platform that is hosting them. As a matter of fact, the platform itself – which is product of a fruitful and continuous interaction between content creators and IT technicians– constitutes a "toolbox" of educational techniques and applications that is well beyond the capabilities of any single MOOC provider to develop.
For this reason, it was excellent news that the platform used by edX – the non-profit organisation founded by Harvard and MIT to create and manage open online courses – was made available for free use by anyone. Specifically, it is an open source platform – OpenEdX – which we translated into Greek, as OpenEdX/gr, to host Mathesis courses. Meanwhile, we are editing its core thanks to our advanced programming skills –a task extremely difficult and resource-consuming –, in order to be able not only to use its existing educational tools, but also to enrich it with our own applications.
Nonetheless, a platform with OpenEdX’s technology, usability and aesthetics has itself very high requirements regarding educational quality of the courses that it hosts. Therefore, Mathesis’ challenge is now this: to ensure – by choosing the appropriate teachers – that the quality of its MOOCs will never be lower than the one of the environment hosting them.