Week of 24 October 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.

LMS

  • This release adds a new option for rescoring specific course problems to the Student Admin page on the Instructor Dashboard and to the Staff Debug Info option for each problem. Course teams can use the Rescore Only if Score Improves option (for an individual learner) or the Rescore Only if Scores Improve option (for all learners) when they want to rescore a problem in a course, but scores are only updated if the scores improve. If rescoring the problem causes a learner’s score to decrease, the edX grader does not rescore the problem for that learner. (TNL-5046)
  • This release also updates, streamlines, and clarifies text and options on the Student Admin page on the Instructor Dashboard.

Studio

  • A new “staff only” option is available for the custom pages that you add to your course. You can now define a new setting, Hide Page from Learners, to identify content that should only be available to members of the course team who have the Staff or Admin role.

    For more information, see Managing the Pages in Your Course in Building and Running an edX Course or Managing the Pages in Your Course in Building and Running an Open edX Course. (OSPR-1327)

  • You can now define additional correct answers for numerical input problems in the same way that you can for text input problems. In the simple editor, additional correct answers are identified by the "or=" Markdown. In the advanced editor, additional correct answers are added in an < additional_answer> OLX element.

    For more information, see Adding Multiple Correct Responses in Building and Running an edX Course or Adding Multiple Correct Responses in Building and Running an Open edX Course. (TNL-5581)

Analytics

  • For Insights, this release adds a Course Home link to the navigation bar on all course pages.

    The navigation bar before the change:

    An example of the navigation bar on the Enrollment page before the change. The bar contains a lens dropdown titled "Enrollment", an active link "Activity", an inactive link "Demographics", and an inactive link "Geography".

    The navigation bar after the change:

    An example of the navigation bar on the Enrollment page after the change. A new link titled "Course Home" at the beginning of the bar is highlighted followed by a lens dropdown titled "Enrollment", an active link "Activity", an inactive link "Demographics", and an inactive link "Geography".

  • Two new SQL tables are now included in the data packages that edX prepares for partner organizations. These tables, student_courseaccessrole and django_comment_client_role_users, contain data to identify the privilege levels, or roles, that individual users have for a course.

    • student_courseaccessrole lists the users who have a privileged role or roles for working in a course.
    • django_comment_client_role_users identifies the privilege role for working in course discussions for every user enrolled in a course.

    For more information, see User Info and Learner Progress Data in the EdX Research Guide. (TNL-4154)