Week of 7 November 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.

Studio

  • Course teams that use proctored exams in their courses can now use a new option on the Advanced Settings page in Studio to control whether verified learners must take proctored exams with online proctoring. Previously, verified learners could opt out of taking proctored exams with online proctoring, with the understanding that this choice made them ineligible for course credit. Now, when course teams set the Allow Opting Out of Proctored Exams option to false, verified learners no longer have the ability to choose to take proctored exams without online proctoring. (TNL-5084) For more information, see Allowing Verified Learners to Opt Out of Proctored Exams in the Building and Running an edX Course guide.
  • On the Certificates settings page in Studio, the Help text in the sidebar now correctly indicates that activation of configured certificates is done by edX partner managers rather than by course team members.

LMS

This release resolves an issue where tasks that were in progress on the Data Download tab in the Instructor Dashboard (such as generating problem reports) did not display in the table of pending tasks. The Pending Tasks table now correctly displays tasks that are in progress. (TNL-5858)

Analytics

In Insights, the Weekly Student Engagement chart and the Content Engagement Breakdown report now include discussion participation counts for each week. Learners who added a post, a response, or a comment are included in this count. The “Participated in Discussions Last Week” metric reports the number of unique users who added a post, response, or comment to any course discussion topic in the last week, and also provides this value as a percentage of currently enrolled students.

For more information, see the Engagement Activity section in the Using edX Insights guide.

Open edX

EdX has updated Django, the web framework that edX uses to develop Studio and the LMS, from version 1.8.15 to version 1.8.16. This update reflects a Django security release and does not result in any user-visible changes. For more information about Django versions, see https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2016/nov/01/security-releases/.