Week of 16 May 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

  • New columns for city and country have been added to the student profile report. (OSPR-1155)

    For more information about the student profile report, see Columns in the Student Profile Report in the Building and Running an edX Course guide, or, for Open edX installations, Columns in the Student Profile Report in the Building and Running an Open edX Course guide.

  • The learner dashboard now offers two pages. The Courses page, which learners see by default, lists all of the courses that learners are enrolled in. The new Programs page lists the programs that learners are enrolled in. This page also indicates learner progress in each of the programs in which they are participating.

    The Programs page for a learner who is enrolled in three XSeries programs. In one of the programs, that learner has earned one certificate, but has not yet earned certificates in either of the other two.

    For more information, see the XSeries Programs Page announcement on the edX partner portal.

  • To improve the experience of learners who use screen readers, the learner dashboard now provides additional, course specific context for each of the Upgrade to Verified or View XSeries Details options that appear on this page. (ECOM-4269, ECOM-4270)

  • A UTF-8 character encoding error that prevented some course teams from downloading the CSV file of certificates issued on the instructor dashboard has been corrected. (CRI-57)

EdX Mobile

Version 2.3.0 of the edX app for both the iOS and Android platforms is now available. This version adds the ability for learners to participate in course discussions in the mobile app, and also introduces course search.

You and your enrolled learners can download the free edX mobile app from Google Play or the App Store.

For answers to frequently asked questions about the mobile app, see If You Use the edX Mobile App section in the EdX Learner’s Guide, or, for Open edX installations, see If You Use the edX Mobile App section in the Open edX Learner’s Guide.

Open EdX

The Open edX Platform APIs guide has been updated with documentation for the courses API.

Analytics

An error that prevented the metadata:discussion_id field from being included for discussion course components in the {org}-{course}-{date}-course_structure-{site}-analytics.json JSON file has been corrected. (AN-6696, PLAT-1029)

Documentation

  • The Open edX Platform APIs guide has been updated with documentation for the courses API.
  • The EdX Research Guide has been reorganized. All of the reference information about the data stored in SQL and noSQL databases is presented first, in a Data Reference section. This section is followed by information that is more specifically applicable to data czars at edX partner institutions. Bookmarks to the information for data czars might need to be updated.