A koala and her baby eat eucalyptus leaves

The summer may be winding down, but our newest community release, Eucalyptus, is just spinning up. As our fifth release, Eucalyptus brings a variety of new features and improvements that will help the global Open edX community reach students around the world.

Please read the Open edX Release Notes for detailed information about Eucalyptus, and follow the Eucalyptus Installation Instructions to take it for a spin.

New Features in Eucalyptus

Some of the new features you’ll find in Eucalyptus are:

  • Badges for completing course events
  • Bookmarks for learners to add to units in the LMS
  • Self-paced courses that allow learners to complete courses at their own pace, in addition to instructor-paced courses
  • Configurable data storage services
  • Course navigation and labelling improvements in the LMS
  • CourseTalk for course reviews
  • For ORA problems, new options for staff grading and a report of learner responses
  • Learner ORA response report
  • Subsection prerequisites, which require learners to achieve a certain score before they progress to the next subsection
  • Teams
  • Updates to E-Commerce checkout

There are also a number of new XBlocks, including:

  • Completion
  • Drag and Drop Problem
  • Peer Instruction

Additionally, community XBlocks are available. Please check out the XBlocks Directory. If you’re a service provider or developer, please consider adding your XBlocks to the XBlock Directory hosted on the Open edX wiki.

Deprecated Features

The following features have been deprecated or deleted from edx-platform:

  • REST APIs (deprecated):
    • Mobile, course structure, and profile images REST web services
  • Tools & Problem Types (deprecated):
    • Randomize component (replaced by randomized content blocks
    • Original drag and drop problem type (replaced by mobile-friendly drag and drop problem
  • Tools & XModules (deleted):
    • The graphical slider tool
    • The crowdsource hinter XModule
    • Support for the always_recalculate_grades XBlock field
    • The ENABLE_JWT_AUTH feature flag

Ficus

The next Open edX release will be Ficus, which we plan to release in early 2017.

Keep Up with the Open edX community

To keep up with Open edX news, check out our e-mail lists and Slack channel, and don’t forget to join us for our monthly “remote meetups” in the #remotemeetup channel on Slack. The next remote meetup will be on Thursday, September 22nd from 10am-11am UTC-4.

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