16 December 2015

The following information reflects what is new in the edX Platform this week.

The edX engineering wiki Release Pages provide access to detailed information about every change made to the edx-platform GitHub repository. If you are interested in additional information about every change in a release, create a user account for the wiki and review the dated release pages.

EdX Studio

  • Course teams can now set due dates to any time, rather than only to times that end in HH:00 or HH:30. For example, course teams can now set due dates to 08:45 or 17:15.
  • The Tools menu in Studio no longer offers the Checklists option. For a template checklist, see the Course Launch Checklist topic in the Building and Running an edX Course guide or Course Launch Checklist topic in the Building and Running an Open edX Course guide.
  • Several unused and deprecated items have been removed from the edX Platform, including the FoldIt protein simulator XModule and the first version of open response assessments (ORA 1). Courses that used ORA 1 continue to have access to associated data.

EdX LMS

  • Support has ended for the “legacy” Instructor Dashboard. The LMS now presents a single version of the Instructor Dashboard. The Revert to Legacy Dashboard option is no longer available.

    The Index of EdX Feature Flags in the Installing, Configuring, and Running the edX Platform guide is updated to reflect this change.

  • To improve accessibility, the list of topics on the Discussion page of the LMS now uses colors that meet WCAG AA guidelines for contrast. As a result, the background color of the selected topic is now white instead of light blue.

EdX Analytics

  • The edX analytics data exporter now includes the following steps to increase the quality of data delivered in SQL tables to partner institutions.

    • All embedded tabs, newlines, and carriage returns have been replaced by the two-character sequences \t, \n, and \r, respectively.
    • Values in timestamp fields now appear without trailing zeros. For example, “2015-10-12 07:51:40.000000” now appear as “2015-10-12 07:51:40”. These changes apply to all of the .sql files in edX data packages, with the exception of data for the courseware_studentmodule table.
    • Backslash characters (\) are now escaped as \\.

    These changes affect data packages available beginning 13 Dec 2015.

  • SQL tables of data for open response assessment (ORA) problems are now included in an ora subdirectory in the weekly database {org}-{date}.zip data file. In addition, the student_anonymoususerid SQL table, which is necessary for interpreting this data, is also included in the weekly database data file.

    These tables are included in data packages available beginning 13 Dec 2015. For more information, see the Open Response Assessment Data section in the EdX Research Guide.

Open Response Assessments

Messaging and other remaining artifacts of the deprecated, original version of the open response assessment problem type, sometimes referred to as ORA 1, have been removed from the platform.

For information about adding open response assessments to a course using the fully supported ORA 2 feature, see Create an Open Response Assessment Assignment.

EdX Documentation

Documentation for edX Partners

EdX Learner’s Guide

The Receiving Your edX Certificate and Enrolling and Pursuing Certificates sections have been updated to reflect the new edX certificate policy.

EdX Research Guide

The Open Response Assessment Data section is now available to introduce the SQL tables that store open response assessment data.

Documentation for Open edX Users

Open edX Learner’s Guide

The Getting a Course Certificate or Badge section has been updated.

XBlock Tutorial

The Introduction to XBlocks topic has been updated to clarify differences between developing XBlocks and developing for the edx- platform repository.

Open edX

  • A problem that caused the platform name or “All rights reserved” text to render incorrectly for some certificates has been fixed. (OSPR-1011)
  • Several unused and deprecated items have been removed from the edX Platform, including several Django elements. The following list includes some of these items.
    • The first version of open response assessments (ORA 1). Courses that used ORA 1 continue to have access to associated data.
    • The Checklist page previously available from the Studio Tools menu.
    • The FoldIt protein simulator XModule.
    • The Psychometrics Django app.
    • The Licenses Django app.
    • The “legacy” Instructor Dashboard, including a Django admin dashboard for analytics reports, which were available by view from the legacy Instructor Dashboard.