Hi again from the edX home office! March was a busy month for us, and we hope you’ll be excited about our newest features.
Improvements for Learners
We want learners to be as satisfied with the overall platform experience as they are with course content. To that end, we’ve resolved a couple of problems that a few learners were running into: Discussions once again show line breaks correctly in posts, responses, and comments, and learners who attempt a problem more than once can now use the Show Answer option multiple times.
Improvements for Course Authors
We want creating your course to be as easy as possible. As announced in the March 2017 product update, we’ve added the ability for course teams to easily move components around the course. We’ve also added the Video ID field to the Basic tab in video components—no more switching tabs to enter essential information!—and resolved a problem that was causing some import and export operations to time out.
In addition to improving the course creation process, we’re making your courses easier to run. First of all, when you view a course as a specific learner, you can now view the learner’s Progress page along with course content. Additionally, to help you manage assessments, we’ve added drag and drop problems to the types of problems that can be rescored, and we’ve added an Open Response Assessment tab to the instructor dashboard to help you locate and access open response assessment (ORA) assignments easily. For more information, see View Statistics for All ORA Assignments in a Course in Building and Running an Open edX Course.
Data Improvements
In February, we introduced the Courses page in Insights. We’ve steadily been adding features to this page, including cards that show enrollment metrics across all courses, tooltips for each card and column name, the ability to search for courses by course name and ID, and filters that allow course teams to sort by course availability. Course teams can now also download a CSV file that includes all of the information in the table, plus enrollment data for all enrollment tracks. For more information, see Courses Page in Using edX Insights.
Accessibility Improvements
Accessibility remains a priority at edX. When a learner selects Show Answer in our basic problem types (including problems such as checkbox and numerical input), a new banner directs the learner to the location of the answer and includes a link to the beginning of the problem. Additionally, to improve screen reader navigation, we’ve streamlined the Bookmarks page.
Information for System Administrators and Developers
The 2017 Open edX conference is only a few weeks away! Learn from and collaborate with over 200 members of the Open edX community on May 24 and 25 at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in Spain. Come a day early or stay a day later to participate in the two “hands-on” days, May 23 and 26. Visit https://con.openedx.org to find information about our speakers, the schedule, and more, or register now!
Coming Soon
Version 2.8 of our iOS and Android edX app is almost here! This new version will include video transcripts and help learners find courses more easily. Also on the edX horizon are automatic certificate generation and the ability to upload more than one file in a response to an ORA assignment. Stay tuned!
