Dogwood is here!

A photo of a dogwood blossom--a white, four petaled flower.While Boston may be covered in snow, here in the edX office, blossoming Dogwood is in the air! This fourth Open edX release brings new features, accessibility improvements, and other options to the platform. A global community uses Open edX to teach and train everywhere from high schools in Australia, universities in Indonesia, companies in England, and, of course, edX.org.

Be sure to read the Open edX Release Notes for detailed information about Dogwood. To get Dogwood, please see the Dogwood Installation Instructions.

New Features in Dogwood

Dogwood presents new features, including:

  • Partial Credit
  • Open edX Analytics Developer Stack
  • Initial Version of Comprehensive Theming
  • Additional File Types for Open Response Assessments
  • Timed Exams
  • LTI XBlock
  • Otto Ecommerce Service

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.

Upgrading Django and Python

In order to keep up with the latest security updates and patches, as well as enabling developers to benefit from new features, we have upgraded Django from 1.4 to 1.8.7 and our Python version to Python 2.7.10. If you are currently running Cypress, upgrading to Dogwood will be a more involved process. If you’re having trouble, read the Installation Guide and try the edx-code or openedx-ops archives.

Deprecated Features

The following have been removed from edx-platform:

  • Original ORA (“ORA1”) Problems
  • Legacy Instructor Dashboard
  • Studio Checklist page
  • Certain XModules and Tools, including the graphical_slider_tool and the FoldIt protein simulator
  • The psychometrics and licenses Django apps

Eucalyptus

The next Open edX release will be Eucalyptus, which will be released in mid-2016.

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 the community at Open edX Con 2016 at Stanford University this June!

Photograph of cornus florida is public domain.

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