Introduction
What is Panorama?
Panorama is a learning analytics system built to scale and support multiple learning platforms. It connects to your learning management systems (LMS) and other supporting systems, gathers all the relevant data, and organizes it in a data lake so it can be used to build dashboards and extract valuable insights.
Its flexible architecture allows connecting to multiple data sources and plugging data processors into the pipeline for more advanced applications. Commercially, Panorama is positioned as an Advanced Multi-LMS Learning Analytics Platform that delivers comprehensive insight into student performance, engagement, and learning outcomes across platforms, unified in a single set of dashboards.
Panorama is designed around a few principles that matter to operators:
Multi-LMS. Connect every platform. A single data lake can combine multiple LMS installations, even of different brands, plus other systems such as surveys, CRM, SIS.
Real-time. Live data synchronization through frequent incremental extraction.
No code / no LMS modifications. Data is extracted from existing databases and logs without changing the LMS itself.
AWS-native. Serverless, secure, and scalable, built on S3, AWS Glue, Athena, and Amazon QuickSight.
Who Panorama is for
Panorama produces role-specific dashboards for every stakeholder in an organization:
Students — personal progress tracking and performance insights tailored to the learner.
Instructors — course engagement metrics, cohort comparisons, and at-risk student identification in real time.
Administrators — platform-wide monitoring, enrollment trends, and operational KPIs across all LMS instances.
Executives — strategic dashboards with revenue analytics, ROI tracking, and high-level performance indicators.
Partners — collaborative analytics and shared reporting for multi-institution or franchise deployments.
Data scientists — advanced query capabilities, predictive analytics, and raw data access.
History
Panorama was born as a spin-off of Aulasneo’s Open edX offering, so it is especially suited to Open edX use cases.
When Aulasneo started working with Open edX, the out-of-the-box analytics system was Insights. It was built on Hadoop, was extremely complicated to set up, and consumed a lot of resources. It was also very limited for the features customers were asking for, such as real-time analytics or custom dashboards.
Many other LMS platforms had their own analytics systems, but they were limited to their own use case and hard to customize. In education, a number of systems usually converge to fulfill the needs of an organization: many institutions run multiple LMS platforms, often of different brands, and other systems such as survey applications, CRM, SIS, etc. hold relevant information that can be combined to enhance analysis. In this context Aulasneo built Panorama.
Why Open edX analytics is special
What makes Open edX special (and difficult to implement) with respect to analytics is that it has three sources of student information:
MySQL database. Where all structured data is stored: user information, grades, exam results, enrollments, and so on.
MongoDB database. Where the course structure is stored, in semi-structured format. It must be converted to tables for analysis.
Tracking logs. Plain-text logs that contain valuable event information, such as student access and video activity. This data source requires additional pre-processing before it can be fed into the pipeline.
Panorama is designed to handle all three. The Extract and Load agent reads MySQL and the derived course structures from MongoDB; tracking log pre-processing is part of the tracking-log pipeline (handled by the Tutor plugin and the Panorama SaaS).
Delivery modes
Panorama is open source. You can install and use it for free. Aulasneo also offers Panorama on a SaaS basis, independently of who provides the LMS service. Aulasneo’s Open edX clients on the Gold plan or higher receive Panorama as part of the service.
Self-hosted (free). To run Panorama yourself you have to:
Create your data lake resources (see Extract and Load: setting up the data lake).
Build the upper layers of the data pipeline (views, joins, calculated fields).
Connect your pipeline to the BI tools (for example Amazon QuickSight).
Panorama SaaS. The managed offering provides:
Data lake infrastructure included.
Tracking-logs pre-processing.
A full data pipeline with a focus on education use cases.
Amazon QuickSight dashboards embedded in your LMS.
These delivery modes map directly to the modes the Open edX backend can run in
(DEMO, FREE, SAAS, CUSTOM). See Open edX Backend: Panorama modes for how each one behaves.
Beyond Open edX
Panorama can connect to Moodle directly or through a Moodle plugin, and to many other systems out of the box or with modest customization. The Extract and Load agent already ships with generic MySQL, CSV, and Excel data sources. See Extract and Load: non-Open edX sources for how to point Panorama at a non-Open edX system, and contact Aulasneo for help with Moodle or other integrations.