Salutations once again from edX headquarters in Cambridge! As the leaves have been bursting into color outside our office, we’ve been busy inside with lots of updates that we think you’ll enjoy.

Improvements for Learners

A course page showing the new navigation and problem features.Assessments are important—and edX has just improved answer options for all assessment types so that learners can complete them successfully. Among other updates, we’ve consolidated the Check and Final Check buttons into one Submit button, and have moved less frequently used actions (such as Save and Show Answer) over to the side. We’ve also more clearly indicated to learners whether problems are graded or ungraded. For more information, see Coming Soon: Enhancements for Standard Problem Types on the Open edX portal or Updated Options for Answering Problems in the October 10 release notes.

While we were making our assessments more intuitive, but we were also improving LMS navigation. We’ve added “Previous” and “Next” text to the left and right arrow buttons at the bottom of the unit page and in the course navigation bar, and we’ve made the Bookmark option on each page stand out more. We’ve also changed the indicator for a learner’s current unit from a gray background to a blue underline. For more information, see Coming Soon: Course Navigation Changes on the Open edX portal or Course Navigation Updates in the October 10 release notes.

Improvements for Course Authors

A checkbox problem open in the advanced editor with highlighted HTML tags inside the label and description elements, along with a rendered version of that problem showing the colored text and bold formatting.

When you create assessments, have you ever wished you could make some words bold in the problem text? Or change the text color? Or add a link? For our core CAPA problem types, such as multiple choice or text input problems, you can now do all that and more! Using the advanced editor, you can include HTML tags inside the and elements, adding links or formatting text the way you want it. And this isn’t the only improvement we’ve made to some of our most common problem types. You can now specify more than one correct answer for numerical input problems—it works the same way as specifying additional correct answers for multiple choice problems—and you can use a