Warmest greetings from edX! We’ve spent the past few weeks working on some exciting new capabilities to help you improve your courses—including partial credit for problems, detailed graphical data about course videos, and the ability to create and generate course certificates without the usual wait.
Open edX Conference
But first: Open edX Con is only three days away! We had a great time at last year’s conference, and we can’t wait to collaborate with and learn from other Open edX developers and course teams. We’re also looking forward to seeing the solutions that you come up with during the hackathon.
Problem Enhancements: Partial Credit
One frequently requested feature has been the ability to award partial credit for assessments. Thanks to a contribution from the Open edX community, edX has updated several problem types—including two types of multiple choice problems, numerical input and text input problems, plus “write your own grader” problems—so that you can offer partial credit to learners whose answers are partly correct. Partial credit can help learners remain motivated and better reflect their understanding of course material.
For more information about partial credit, see Awarding Partial Credit for a Problem in Building and Running an Open edX Course.
Video Data from Insights
You’ve just released a new video in your course. How many learners watched the whole thing? How many are pausing to get a better look at that comic you added? Which parts are learners watching over and over again? EdX Insights now presents all this information and more as easy-to-read graphical data, helping you discover which course content is most effective. You can get an overview of how many learners watched each video for the week, then drill down into an individual video to discover the exact points when learners started or stopped watching. When you examine an individual video, you can also see a preview of that video above the graph that represents it, so you can easily find out what’s happening in the video when some of those peaks and valleys occur.
For more information, see Engagement with Course Videos in Using edX Insights.
Improved Certificate Generation Process
We’ve recently reengineered the certificate generation process, making it much more streamlined and giving you more control over your certificates. You can now configure and preview your own certificates in Studio by entering course information and uploading signature image files, then activate your certificates when you’re ready to distribute them.
For more information, see Setting Up Course Certificates in Building and Running an Open edX Course.
Coming Soon: Timed Exams
We’re excited to announce that you will soon be able to create timed exams. With timed exams, you can set limits on the amount of time learners have to complete a set of problems. A learner must submit the exam within the amount of time you set to get credit for the correct answers. Time keeps running on the exam even if learners leave the page or even close their browsers entirely.
