Week of 18 January 2016¶

The following information summarizes what is new in the edX platform this week.

The edX engineering wiki Release Pages provide 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 ¶

Self-Paced or Instructor-Paced Course Configuration ¶

Course teams can now select the way a course is delivered to learners: the Schedule & Details page in Studio now includes a setting for either instructor-paced or self-paced courses.

If you select the Instructor-Paced option, you must set release dates for content and due dates for assignments in your course.
If you select the Self-Paced option, your course does not have release dates or due dates.

For more information, see Setting Course Pacing in Building and Running an edX Course or Setting Course Pacing in Building and Running an Open edX Course.

Staff Grading Options for Open Response Assessments ¶

The latest enhancement to open response assessments is the ability for course staff to grade learner responses. Course staff now have two options to grade learner responses in open response assessments.

In Studio, course teams can now design open response assessments to include a staff assessment step as part of the assignment.
In the LMS, course teams can now perform an assessment of any individual learner’s response at any time to override their assignment grade.

For more information, see Managing Open Response Assessment Assignments in Building and Running an edX Course.

Teams ¶

Using teams to divide learners into smaller groups is an effective way to provide small group interactions and projects in your course.

You can now design a course to include teams. To enable teams in Studio, you configure team size and set up team topics on the Advanced Settings page.

When teams are enabled, a learner can browse topics and then create a team to take part in group activities within the chosen topic.

For more information see Teams Overview in Building and Running an edX Course.

Other Changes ¶

An error that prevented LaTeX (MathJax) formatted equations entered in the Raw HTML editor from rendering correctly has been resolved. (TNL-3968)

EdX LMS ¶

An error that prevented learners who audited a course, earned a certificate, and then upgraded to a verified certificate from regenerating their certificates has been corrected. (ECOM-3401)

Documentation ¶

As of 1 January 2016, the edX documentation team no longer maintains an individual change log for each guide. These release notes provide a weekly summary of platform changes, and include links to more complete documentation when it is available. If you are interested in detailed information about every change made to the edX documentation set, the edx-documentation repository on GitHub provides a complete record.

Documentation for edx.org Users ¶

Guides described in this section are intended for audiences that are using, or learning about, courses on the edx.org or edge.edx.org websites.

Building and Running an edX Course¶

The Setting Course Pacing topic is now available.
The Managing Open Response Assessment Assignments topic is now available.
The Teams Overview topic is now available.
Another use case for Office Mix has been added to the description of the Office Mix tool. In this use case, after you create a mix you export the presentation to video and then include it in your course using the video component.

Documentation for Open edX Users ¶

Guides described in this section are intended for audiences that are using, or learning about, courses on an Open edX instance.

Building and Running an Open edX Course¶

The Setting Course Pacing topic is now available.