Putting Education Within Reach

edX is a global online learning platform created by Harvard and MIT, and it's the primary brand for 2U.

By expanding access and affordability to higher education and by partnering with the world’s leading universities and organizations, edX aims to transform digital learning.

Here at Adapt, we’re thrilled to have been working with edX on this mission since 2021.

edX has an incredible bank of courses. From professional certificates to master’s degrees, there’s something for every learner. But, the classes are only helpful if learners can find them. edX and 2U tasked Adapt with helping the team gain new learners and improve the site’s performance.

The project had two main objectives: 

• ATTRACT: Bring in more users through a combination of organic and paid tactics

• MATCH: Help users easily find the right product for them from over 4000+ offerings

A significant issue was that edX and 2U didn’t have the ability to build the custom pages they wanted. Content creators had to choose between structured templatized pages or hard-coded pages that offered little flexibility.

Lucky for them, this is where Adapt shines…

edX is integrated with Contentful, a headless CMS platform that allows content to be managed in one place and deployed across any front end. edX and 2u have courses that live in their own database, which is now combined with Contentful data when the page is built.

This new Contentful integration lets content editors and marketers build more exciting pages, create and reference specific content, and reach the desired students, which is all part of the 2U strategy for improving organic traffic and search rankings.

After the launch, the edX team was thrilled. Since June, all content creation has been centralized in Contentful, and the content creation team has created and published almost 1000 new pages without requiring mass hiring.

Our goal is always to leave websites better than we found them, and this extends beyond something like a facelift. We want changes that Make a Difference.

Digital technologies account for 4% of all greenhouse gas emissions, and the average website produces 60kg of C02 every year. Luckily, there are ways to reduce a website's carbon footprint, which often makes websites more accessible to everyone.

While working together, our team successfully turned edX onto Cloudflare Polish. Cloudflare Polish automatically optimizes images on a site by reducing the image size before it gets to the user, improving a website's speed, performance, and usability.

So how does this affect the environment? Well, the longer a page takes to load, the more CO2 it emits and the greater its climate impact. By optimizing these images, edX’s website, with over 12M visitors per month, significantly reduces its carbon footprint.

Curious to learn more?  Reach out to us!

There’s more great work to be done as we continue this partnership, including further improvements in search rankings and new ways to reach audiences.

Stay tuned for more updates!