We have just released the final version of the latest Open edX tree release, Ginkgo! This is our seventh Open edX release, and we’re excited to share it with our community.
A big thanks to everyone who contributed to making this release possible—particularly Jill Vogel from OpenCraft, who helped shepherd many features into the final release as well as provided valuable feedback during the release process.
Ginkgo includes significant changes to the course outline, video player, administering exams, and more! Here are some highlights:
LMS
- The Course page now opens to a course outline that serves as the basis for a new course home experience. This course outline features a full-page course outline that lists all sections and subsections at once. It replaces the course outline sidebar on course content pages that listed sections and subsections. It allows learners to focus on content consumption and progression through the course. For more information, see Course Navigation Changes on the Open edX portal.
- The video player now uses HLS video playback when YouTube videos are not available. HLS causes the player to continually check each learner’s internet connection and adjust video playback, so that learners are always viewing the highest quality video possible for their internet connection.
- Learners now receive an email when they’ve submitted a proctored exam that lets them know their exam has been received, as well as when to expect scores. This email also provides information about whether the learner has passed or failed proctoring and why.
- Learners can now sort inline discussions by most votes, most activity, and recent activity.
- Learner responses for open response assessments can now include more than one file. The maximum cumulative upload size has been increased to 10 MB.
- The LMS is compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 level AA. We have made a number of accessibility improvements that, among other things, provide easier navigation using keyboards, screen readers, or other assistive technology.
Studio and Course Author Tools
- Course staff can now send emails to learners based on their enrollment track, so you can reach all verified or audit track learners at one time. For more information, see Bulk Email.
- Course authors can move components from one location to another in a course.
- You can upload transcripts for videos that are not hosted on YouTube on the Basic tab of a video component.
- The instructor dashboard includes an Open Response Assessment tab to help locate and access open response assessments and provide data about learner progress in completing responses and peer assessments.
- The Show Results setting for problems allows course teams to hide problem results from learners, including both whether the learner answered the problem correctly and the learner’s score, either temporarily or permanently. Using this feature, course teams can hide exam scores until the exam due date, or administer surveys without revealing responses.
Insights & analytics
- A new Courses page in Insights provides a dashboard view of all of your courses. For information, see Overview of All Courses.
Deployment Notes
Ginkgo installation follows the same steps as previous releases. Start here to learn about the possibilities: Installation Options.
We’ve added data migration instructions to the Ginkgo installation guide. To upgrade a Ficus installation to Ginkgo, you’ll install a new Ginkgo machine, then move and migrate your data from the Ficus machine to Ginkgo. A new version of Ficus (Ficus.4) was just released to make this migration smoother. Only Ficus.4 will upgrade cleanly to Ginkgo.
Detailed release notes
More detailed release notes, including more technical details, can be found on the Ginkgo release notes page on docs.edx.org.
Get started
To get started with Ginkgo, review the Open edX installation options and if you have any questions, feel free to get in touch with our wonderful community of developers, operators and educators!
Related monthly product updates
To get more details on what else has changed in the 6 months between Ficus and Ginkgo, you can review the full monthly product updates:
