Week of 18 April 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 LMS ¶

Movable Closed Captions ¶

Those who choose to view the closed captioning for a video can now move the captions to a different place on the video. When you move the mouse pointer over the caption control, the pointer now changes to a four-headed arrow. You can then drag the caption and drop it onto another part of the video screen.

The following images show an example of captions being moved.

A video with closed captions at the bottom of the video, with the pointer indicated.

A video with closed captions in motion toward the top of the video, with the pointer indicated.

Sorting by Date for Discussion Posts ¶

A problem with the method used to sort discussion posts in web browsers is now fixed. Previously, when a learner sorted discussion posts by recent activity in a web browser, the discussion posts were sorted by creation date rather than last activity date. Discussion posts are now sorted correctly. (TNL-3818)

EdX Studio ¶

Date Validation for Course Updates ¶

When course teams add a course update in Studio, the system now validates the value entered as the date of the update. Previously, course teams could enter any value in the Date field, including text strings or null values. However, the LMS could not successfully display an update unless it had a valid date. Learners received an error message on the course Home page instead of the update.

Now, when a course team member saves an update, Studio verifies that the Date field contains a valid date. (TNL-4115)

Open edX ¶

Settings for Querystring Authentication ¶

You can now choose whether to use querystring authentication for assets served from AWS S3. To disable querystring authentication, you define two new settings. You set AWS_QUERYSTRING_AUTH to False, and then set AWS_S3_CUSTOM_DOMAIN to your S3 domain value. If you disable querystring authentication, the URLs for course assets no longer include the S3 query strings, and are significantly reduced in length.

Updates to Dogwood ¶

The Dogwood.2 patch release is now available. This release includes fixes for several security and installation issues, updates Django to version 1.8.12, and adds a control for discontinuing audit certificates.

For more information, see the Open edX release notes for Dogwood.

EdX Website ¶

For learners who enroll in the verified certificate track of a course that is offered on the edx.org website, this release includes changes to streamline the checkout process.