ICdeBA: Open edX Implementation Success Story

ICdeBA (Instituto Clínico de Buenos Aires) is a psychoanalytic graduate school with a long tradition of working with mental health professionals in Argentina. On March 19, 2020, the Argentine government established a lockdown that closed all schools to prevent COVID-19 from spreading. Although initially announced for two weeks, it became clear the restrictions would last several months.

For ICdeBA this posed a critical challenge: launching 75 online courses for 500 students with a team of 100 teachers and assistants who had no experience with technology or video conferencing — with less than two weeks before the academic year was scheduled to begin.

Aulasneo proposed implementing Open edX as the LMS to manage all online courses for the institution. Given that ICdeBA's courses have a significant synchronous component, Zoom was integrated via LTI to complement all asynchronous materials.

Open edX's flexible role assignment system allowed the configuration of specific permissions for students, teachers, teaching assistants, and school administrators — giving each group exactly the access they needed.

Thanks to Open edX's robust feature set and ICdeBA's fast decision-making process, the entire virtual campus — including the creation of 75 courses — was implemented in one week. ICdeBA started its academic year only one week later than originally scheduled.

The implementation included training sessions for teachers and assistants so they could deliver classes independently without ongoing external assistance. This autonomy was made possible by Open edX's intuitive user experience for all roles.

• 75 courses launched in 7 days
• 500 students onboarded to the new virtual campus
• 100 teachers and assistants trained independently
• Zoom integrated via LTI for synchronous classes
• Unified communication channel via course mass emails
• Academic year delayed by only one week despite the lockdown

This implementation demonstrated the key advantages of Open edX as a flexible, scalable, and powerful LMS. Non-tech-savvy users were able to take and deliver online courses with superior performance and an excellent academic experience — validating Open edX as the right choice for educational institutions that need to move fast without sacrificing quality.

Our Aulasneo managed hosting handled all infrastructure so ICdeBA's team could focus entirely on education.

This case was featured on the official Open edX blog as an example of how the platform helped educational institutions face the COVID-19 lockdown challenges. You can read the full feature here: Open edX Platform: A Crucial Solution to Face COVID-19 Lockdown Academic Challenges — openedx.org