Recommendations – Open EdTech

Choosing the right products for a new online education project can be tricky. We are here to help!

This page lists our recommendations for products, standards and tools that are very aligned with the values and criteria of Open EdTech. It is not exhaustive and we are updating this page all the time. If you have suggestions for additions, become a member (it’s free!) and let’s discuss it!

Certified Open EdTech products

These are products that have been assessed as fitting our five criteria for Open EdTech products.

Product	Open Source	Sustainable	Directed by Educators	Community of developers	Open EdTech standards
Big Blue Button	BigBlueButton was launched as an open source project in 2007 under the LGPL 3 license and to date has received over 40k commits from the community.	BigBlueButton is sustained by a core group of commercial companies that fund and support its core development.	The focus of the project is to build the world’s most effective virtual classroom for educators. Our roadmap is based on pedagogy and the features for each release are taken directly from educators.	– Over 195 contributors world-wide and actively supports developers through interaction on our GitHub issues and bigbluebutton-dev mailing list. We provide extensive documentation to our community to help them install, develop, and integrate.	xAPI, LTI, WCAG 2.1 AA BigBlueButton integration for Moodle
Moodle	Moodle was first released in 2001 under the GPL license (originally v2 and now v3)	Core team of 280 supported by professional services at moodle.com	– Constant UX research – Core product advisory groups with key users – Issue tracker and forums	– 1006 contributors from 60 countries – Developer support – Over 2000 community plugins – Issue tracker and forums	RSS WCAG Matrix LTI

Open EdTech interoperability standards

These are standards that we recommend that all Education technology should support, where appropriate.

They allow interoperability among software and people, enabling organisations to create systems that work well for both educators and students.

Standard	Maintainer	Description
ActivityPub	W3C	Allows for content to stream
LTI	1EdTech	Learning Tools Interoperability allows tools to use each other across the internet, passing user data one way and grades back.
Matrix	Matrix.org Foundation	Matrix is an open protocol for decentralised, secure communications.
RSS	RSS Board	RSS allows the stream of content including text and media of all kinds. It is not a perfect standard but it is very popular and widely supported.
WCAG	W3C Web Accessibility Initiative	Accessibility standards enable applications and media to be used by anyone regardless of capability
WebRTC	Google	For streaming video

(These are currently drafts, the OET Association is actively discussing all these standards and many more!)

Other tools we recommend

These are other tools and components that we recommend when building your Open EdTech solutions.

Tool	Maintainer	Description
Ollama	Ollama	An easy and safe way to run LLMs on your own hardware. Local AI means your data stays local and you have full control – you can even run your own custom models.
OpenWebUI	Tim J. Baek	Open WebUI is an extensible, feature-rich, and user-friendly self-hosted AI interface designed to operate entirely offline. It supports various LLM runners, including Ollama and OpenAI-compatible APIs.