Open edX Cypress Release¶

Badges¶

Badges provide a way for learners to share their course achievements. For courses that have badges enabled, learners receive a badge when they receive a course certificate, and have the option of sharing their badges to a badging site such as Mozilla Backpack.

Open edX supports Open Badges, an open standard originally developed by the Mozilla Foundation. For more information about Open Badges, see http://openbadges.org/.

For more information, see the following documentation.

• For information about enabling badges on your instance of Open edX, see Enabling Badges in Installing, Configuring, and Running the Open edX Platform.

• For information about setting up a course for learners to receive badges, see Enable or Disable Badges for Your Course in Building and Running an Open edX Course.

• For information about badges for learners, see Upload a Badge to Mozilla Backpack in the Open edX Learner’s Guide.

Cohorts¶

Course teams now create and manage cohorts on the Instructor Dashboard in the LMS, instead of on the Advanced Settings page in Studio. Course teams can use the new Cohorts page there to add and rename cohorts, change a cohort’s assignment method, associate cohorts with content groups, and specify whether course-wide and content-specific discussions are divided by cohort.

For more information, see Including Learner Cohorts in Building and Running an Open edX Course.

Course Certificates¶

You can now create one certificate configuration per course. This configuration serves as the template for certificates issued for all of the enrollment tracks available for your course (such as “honor code” or “verified”). Honor code certificates use the organization logo and signatory information, but do not include signature images, which are used only for verified certificates.

For more information, see Setting Up Course Certificates in Building and Running an Open edX Course.

Course Search¶

Learners can now search much of the content of your Open edX courses, including the course title, description, text, and video transcripts. Learners can search for a term in an individual course, or for that term in all of the courses in which they are enrolled, whether the course is active or archived.

When the search engine returns results, either for an individual course or across all courses, you can select any search result to view that result in the courseware.

For more information, see the following documentation.

• For information about enabling course search on your instance of Open edX, see Enable Course Search in Installing, Configuring, and Running the Open edX Platform.

• For information about setting up a course for learners to be able to search its content, see Course Search in Building and Running an Open edX Course.

• For information about searching courses for learners, see Searching the Course in the Open edX Learner’s Guide.

Creative Commons¶

Course teams can now specify either “All Rights Reserved” or a Creative Commons license for a course. Course teams can also select different license options for each video.

For more information, see the following documentation.

• For information about configuring your Open edX instance, see Enabling Course and Video Licensing in Installing, Configuring, and Running the Open edX Platform.

• For information about licensing course content, see Licensing a Course in Building and Running an Open edX Course.

• For information about licensing for learners, see Course and Video Licenses in the Open edX Learner’s Guide.

Custom Courses¶

Course teams can create a custom course experience (CCX) to reuse course content. By using a CCX, course teams can run some or all of an existing course for a group of students on a new schedule.

For information about enabling CCX in your instance, see Enabling Custom Courses in Installing, Configuring, and Running the Open edX Platform.

For information about using CCX, see Creating a Custom Course in Building and Running an Open edX Course.

Grade Report Enhancements¶

The grade report now includes new columns with certificate status and enrollment track information. When course teams generate the grade report from the Instructor Dashboard, they can see the following additional information for each learner.

• Enrollment track, to identify the learner’s enrollment mode as honor, verified, or professional education.

• Verification status, to identify learners in the verified or professional track who have completed identity verification with edX.

• Certificate eligibility status, to identify learners who have earned the passing grade in the course at the time of the grade report generation.

• Certificate delivery status, to identify learners who have received their certificates.

• The type of certificate, for learners who are eligible to receive a certificate.

For more information, see Interpret the Grade Report in Building and Running an Open edX Course.

Feedback and Hints in Common Problems¶

Course teams can now add feedback, hints, or both to the following problem types.

• Checkbox

• Dropdown

• Multiple choice

• Numerical input

• Text input

In Studio, course teams can use new templates to add sample problems that use the feedback and hint syntax.

For more information, see Adding Feedback and Hints to a Problem in Building and Running an Open edX Course.

HTML Spell Check in Studio¶

When you edit an HTML component in Studio, an automated spell checker indicates any misspelled words. The spell checker automatically uses the dictionary that is set for your browser.

Learner Profiles¶

With the new Open edX Learner Profile feature, course teams and learners can share information about themselves with the community. The profile can include an image that identifies the user on the Open edX site as well as the user’s location and other biographical information. Course teams and other learners in the course can view others’ profiles.

For more information, see Exploring the Profile Page in Building and Running an Open edX Course and Exploring the Profile Page for Learners in the Open edX Learner’s Guide.

LTI Provider¶

New options that leverage learning tools interoperability (LTI) are available in this release.

Previously, course teams could use Studio as a tool consumer: course teams could set up an LTI component to embed external tools, such as learning applications and textbooks, into an edX course.

Now, course teams can identify content from their edX courses to embed with other content on their campus systems. Teams can specify the course units, videos, and graded and ungraded problems that already exist in an edX course for launch within a campus LMS such as Blackboard or Canvas. Student scores for graded content are transferred to the campus system.

Authentication between the campus system and the edX system that provides the content can be configured either to anonymously provision students or to prompt for account creation.

New Studio Templates¶

This release includes new templates for HTML and problem components. These templates provide updated guidelines and examples, accessibility information, and links to documentation.

Original Open Response Assessment Problems Deprecated¶

When you access a course that contains an open response assessment created using the original version of this assignment type (ORA 1), Studio now displays the message, “This course uses features that are no longer supported.”

A newer version of the open response assessments feature (ORA 2) was released over a year ago, and the ability to add ORA 1 problems was removed from Studio in May 2014.

For information about adding ORA 2 problems to a course, see Open Response Assessments.

Poll and Survey Tools¶

Course teams can now include two new types of components in courses.

• Use the Poll tool to pose a question to learners and have them select an answer from a set list.

  For more information, see Poll Tool in Building and Running an Open edX Course.

• Use the Survey tool to pose multiple questions to learners and have them select an answer for each question from a set list.

  For more information, see Survey Tool in Building and Running an Open edX Course.

When polls and surveys are included in a course, course teams can analyze the responses and also choose whether to let learners see the aggregate answers for the class.

Problem Appearance Changes¶

To make the Open edX LMS easier to use on mobile devices, the appearance of common problem types has changed. For example, a border surrounds options for multiple choice and checkbox problems, and the entire area within the border is selectable, making it easier for learners to select an option.

Problem Grade Report¶

For any course, course teams can now calculate grades for problems and generate a report that can be downloaded from the Instructor Dashboard. This new report includes, for each graded problem, a learner’s earned and possible points, and her total score, expressed as a decimal.

For more information, see Generate a Problem Grade Report for Enrolled Students in Building and Running an Open edX Course.

Randomized Content Blocks¶

Course teams can now include a new type of component, a randomized content block, in their courses. These components randomly draw problems from a predefined library of components and present them to learners.

Course teams create and maintain libraries of components separately from courses. All of an organization’s course teams can work collaboratively to develop the problems that the libraries contain. Each library can then be referenced by randomized content blocks in any of that organization’s courses.

For more information, see Working with Libraries in Building and Running an Open edX Course.

Report of Not-Yet Enrolled Students¶

Course teams for invitation-only courses can now track enrollment status from the Instructor Dashboard. The Data Download page of the Instructor Dashboard now includes a downloadable report of learners who have been invited to enroll in a course, but who have not yet done so.

For more information, see the Enrollment section in Building and Running an Open edX Course.

Third Party Authentication¶

To enhance sign in options for your users, you can enable third party authentication between institutional authentication systems and your implementation of Open edX. After you enable third party authentication and integrate with SAML or OAuth2 identity providers, users can register and sign in to your Open edX site with their campus or institutional credentials.

For more information, see Enabling Third Party Authentication in Installing, Configuring, and Running the Open edX Platform.

Uploading ORA2 Files to Alternative Storage Systems¶

By default, the Open Response Assessment (ORA2) application stores files that learners upload in an Amazon S3 bucket.

With the Cypress release, you can configure ORA2 to store files in an alternate system. To have learners’ files stored in a system other than Amazon S3, you must complete the following steps.

1. Implement the BaseBackend class defined in the base.py file.

   For example, the S3.py file in the same directory is an implementation of BaseBackend for Amazon S3. You must implement the equivalent class for the storage system you intend to use.

2. Configure ORA2 to use your alternative storage system by modifying the value of backend_setting in init file to point to your implementation of BaseBackend.

3. Add code to instantiate the new implementation to the get_backend()` function in the init.py file.

4. Configure ORA2 to use the alternative storage system by modifying the value of ORA2_FILEUPLOAD_BACKEND in the Django settings to point to your implementation of BaseBackend.

YouTube API 3.0 API Key¶

The Open edX Platform uses Version 3 of the YouTube API, which requires that the application use an API key.

If you intend for courses on your Open edX instance to include videos that are hosted on YouTube, you must get a YouTube API key and set the key in the Open edX Platform.

For more information, see Set YouTube API Key in Installing, Configuring, and Running the Open edX Platform.