EdX publishes documentation on the docs.edx.org website. Guides are available to help learners, course teams, researchers, developers, and other audiences use edX websites and software effectively.
The following information provides a weekly summary of what is new in edX documentation.
In the LMS, a new user assistance option is now available on every page. On the edx.org site, learners now select Support to ask questions, report problems, and access the edX FAQ. In addition, a new Help option is now available on each page. Selecting this option opens the EdX Learner’s Guide.
For Open edX instances, selecting the new Help option opens the Open edX Learner’s Guide.
A new section that describes how to set up different sites for an Open edX installation is now available in the Installing, Configuring, and Running an Open edX Site guide. For more information, see Configuring Open edX Sites.
In the EdX Learner’s Guide, the Receiving Your edX Certificate and Enrolling and Pursuing Certificates topics have been reorganized and updated.
A new section in the Installing, Configuring, and Running the Open edX Platform guide describes how to configure an Open edX instance to serve course assets from a content delivery network (CDN) instead of directly from your Open edX instance. Using a CDN offloads the work required to deliver assets from your Open edX instance. For more information, see Enabling a CDN for Course Assets.
A topic that describes how to use the XBlock URL to render an XBlock in HTML without the user interface of the LMS is now available. See Rendering XBlocks with the XBlock URL in the Open edX Developer’s Guide or Rendering XBlocks with the XBlock URL in the Open edX XBlock Tutorial.
The Getting Started with edX section in the Building and Running an edX Course guide and the Getting Started on edX section in the EdX Learner’s Guide have been updated to clarify the process of creating and activating accounts on edx.org and edX Edge.
New and changed analytics events related to navigation in the LMS are documented in the EdX Research Guide*. For more information, see Course Navigation Events.
The “Learning in a MOOC” topic has been added to the Welcome! section in the EdX Learner’s Guide.
A new section, Data Security Guidelines for Data Czars, is now included in the EdX Research Guide. These guidelines are intended as a starting point for data czars at partner insitutions as they implement policies to safeguard the learner data they receive from edX.
The Building and Running an edX Course and Building and Running an Open edX Course guides now include information about the new drag and drop problem type. This new drag and drop problem type is more flexible and accessible, and should be used instead of the deprecated version. For more information, see Drag and Drop Problem in the Building and Running an edX Course guide or Drag and Drop Problem in the Building and Running an Open edX Course guide.
Analytics events for the new drag and drop problem type are described in Drag and Drop Events in the EdX Research Guide.
Open edX sites can customize the styling of the new drag and drop problem type. For more information, see Styling Drag and Drop Problems in the Installing, Configuring, and Running the Open edX Platform guide.
The Installing, Configuring, and Running the Open edX Platform guide now includes information about the CourseTalk widget. For more information, see Adding the CourseTalk Widget.
The Installing, Configuring and Running the Open edX Platform guide now includes information about creating and configuring badges for custom course events. For more information, see Create Course Event Badges for Your Open edX Instance.
The Open edX Learner’s Guide now includes information for learners about viewing badges they have earned in their profile, if badging is enabled on the platform. For more information, see Viewing Earned Badges in Your Profile.
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.
Guides described in this section are intended for audiences that are using, or learning about, courses on an Open edX instance.
A new section, “Adding E-Commerce to the Open edX Platform”, is now available in the Installing, Configuring, and Running the Open edX Platform guide. Two versions of this guide are available on the docs.edx.org website.
The search feature for edX documentation includes two improvements.
.. include:: for
some results. Those search results now show a sample of the actual
documentation content in the results.A note has been added to alert course teams to a best practice for using open response (ORA) assignments. Each course unit must contain only one ORA assignment. Multiple ORA assignments in a unit cause errors when learners submit peer assessments.
For more information, see Best Practices for Open Response Assessments in the Building and Running an edX Course guide or Best Practices for Open Response Assessments in the Building and Running an Open edX Course guide.
Release notes for 2013 and 2014 are now located in a separate guide, edX Release Notes 2013-2014. Release notes for 2015 and 2016 are still available at edX Release Notes.
Guides described in this section are intended for audiences that are using, or learning about, courses on an Open edX instance.
The Configure OAuth Token Expiration topic is now available.
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.
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.
The Peer Instruction Tool topic is now available.
The Explaining Multiple Choice Answers topic is now available.
audit_notpassing and audit_passing statuses
has been added to the EdX Research Guide. For more information, see
ref:data:certificates_generatedcertificate.Guides described in this section are intended for audiences that are using, or learning about, courses on an Open edX instance.
The Peer Instruction Tool topic is now available.
The Explaining Multiple Choice Answers topic is now available.
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.
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.
Guides described in this section are intended for audiences that are using, or learning about, courses on an Open edX instance.
The Setting Course Pacing topic is now available.
The Bookmarking Course Content section has been added.
Bookmark event information has been added to Bookmark Events.
Guidance for the most appropriate heading levels to use in HTML components has been added to the Working with HTML Components topic.
The Receiving Your edX Certificate and Enrolling and Pursuing Certificates sections have been updated to reflect the new edX certificate policy.
The Open Response Assessment Data section is now available to introduce the SQL tables that store open response assessment data.
The Getting a Course Certificate or Badge section has been updated.
The Introduction to XBlocks topic has been updated to clarify differences between developing XBlocks and developing for the edx- platform repository.
lti_consumer) and about configuring the way that LTI components launch to
the LTI Component topic.lti_consumer) and about configuring the way that LTI components launch to
the LTI Component topic.Added the Changing the Appearance of Open edX Sites section.
Added information about additional file types that learners can upload to the Submit a File with Your Response topic.
Added information about additional file types that learners can upload to the Submit a File with Your Response topic.
Added the Prohibiting Submission of Specified File Types topic.
Added the Designing Your Course For a Mobile Experience section.
Added the Index of EdX Feature Flags topic to list most edX feature flags, along with their status and default value.
Updated the Engagement with Course Content and Computation Reference sections. Metrics for engagement with content are now expressed as percentages in addition to counts.
This section lists updates to the latest versions of Open edX documentation. EdX does not update the documentation for named Open edX releases.
Added the Timed Exams section.
Added the Installing an XBlock topic to provide guidance about expanding the Open edX platform by adding XBlocks.
Added the Third-Party Content Events section.
This section lists updates to the latest versions of Open edX documentation. We do not update the documentation for Open edX releases.
Updated all topics in Configuring the Open edX Platform to instruct users to modify the lms.env.json and cms.env.json files, not the corresponding Python files.
Updated the Print a Certificate section.
This section lists updates to the latest versions of Open edX documentation. We do not update the documentation for Open edX releases.
The video engagement feature in edX Insights is now available for courses running on edx.org and edX Edge. Updated the Engagement with Course Videos section to change the computation of this data from weekly to daily, and from aggregate view counts to average view counts at the section and subsection levels.
Updated the Receiving Your edX Certificate topic to include information about web certificates.
This section lists updates to the latest versions of Open edX documentation. We do not update the documentation for Open edX releases.
Added the Contributing to the Documentation for Your Open Source Feature topic.
This section lists updates to the latest versions of Open edX documentation. We do not update the documentation for Open edX releases.
The Qualtrics Survey Tool is now documented in the Creating Exercises and Tools section. You can use this fully supported tool to import surveys created in Qualtrics into your course.
The Qualtrics Survey Tool is now documented in the Creating Exercises and Tools section. You can use this tool to import surveys created in Qualtrics into your course.
The new Specific Student View section provides instructions for course teams to view the course as a specific student.
The new Specific Student View section provides instructions for course teams to view the course as a specific student.
EdX has just released the Open edX XBlock Tutorial. This tutorial guides developers through the process of creating an XBlock, and explains the concepts and anatomy of XBlocks.
There is a separate EdX XBlock API Guide.
A Best Practices for Open Response Assessments topic has been added to the documentation about open response assessments. For more information about open response assessments, see Open Response Assessments in the Building and Running an edX Course guide.
A Best Practices for Open Response Assessments topic has been added to the documentation about open response assessments. For more information about open response assessments, see Open Response Assessments in the Building and Running an Open edX Course guide.
The Problems, Exercises, and Tools section now includes details for the new poll and survey tools.
In the latest version of this guide, the Problems, Exercises, and Tools section includes details for the new poll and survey tools.
A new Adding Feedback and Hints to a Problem section describes the new problem templates that include hinting and feedback.
The Accessibility Best Practices Guidance for Content Providers section has been expanded and moved to the top level of the guide.
The Student Performance section is updated to reflect that submission data is now averaged rather than summed.
The docs.edx.org website now includes a section for the latest version of the Open edX guides. These guides are available in addition to guides for the Open edX Birch release, and offer the most up-to-date documentation available for features in the Open edX platform.
The new Enabling Custom Courses section describes how to configure the Open edX Platform to allow users with the right permissions to create custom courses.
In the EdX Platform APIs guide, the Enrollment API Version 1.0 section has been updated to reflect the addition of a new GET parameter that will include expired course modes. For details, see Get the User’s Enrollment Status in a Course.
The Working with Video Components section now includes an Adding a Pre-Roll Video to Your edX Course topic.
video_show_cc_menu and video_hide_cc_menu events.The docs.edx.org web site now includes a section for the latest version of the Open edX guides. These guides are available in addition to guides for the Open edX Birch release, and offer the most up-to-date documentation available for features in the Open edX platform.
A new section of the EdX Platform APIs guide is now available for the Profile Images API Version 1.0 (Deprecated).
The new Licensing a Course topic provides information about course licensing options.
The new Understanding How Courses and Videos Are Licensed topic describes the visual license indications that learners see in courseware and for videos if the course team specifies licenses.
The new Enabling Course and Video Licensing topic provides information about how to enable course licensing options for Open edX.
This guide includes many changes in the past week. For details, see the Change Log for 2015.
pause_video,
play_video, and stop_video Video Interaction Events to
include the effects of a Video Start Time or Video Stop Time.This guide now includes information on the Video Data API.
The grade report that course teams can download from the Instructor Dashboard now includes columns with information about learners’ enrollment tracks and certificate statuses. For more information, see Interpreting the Grade Report.
enrollment_start
and enrollment_end fields.For more information, see the Exploring Your Dashboard, Settings, and Profile section.
In the Problems, Exercises, and Tools section, a new column in the tables indicates the level of support that edX provides for each exercise or tool.
New columns were added to the auth_userprofile table and a new
student_languageproficiency table was added to reflect changes for the
Profiles feature. For more information, see the User Info and Learner Progress Data
section.
Added the Ungraded Problem Submissions section to the Using edX Insights guide.
Added the Course Content Data section to describe the course structure file.
Added sections for Course Structure API Version 0 (Deprecated), Enrollment API Version 1.0, and User API Version 1.0.
Added the Language Style Guidelines section with guidelines for Objective-C contributions.
Added registration and enrollment to If You Use the edX Mobile App section.
The Events in the Tracking Logs chapter now includes events for student interactions with library content.
The Events in the Tracking Logs chapter now contains descriptions of these events.
Added the Student Performance section to the Using edX Insights guide.
The Creating Cohort-Specific Course Content section now reflects the ability to delete content groups and view their usage in a course.
This guide now includes new chapters for the Open edX Birch Release.
The following new guides are now available specifically for Open edX.
This guide now includes a new section containing guidelines and tips for developing code that is compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. See edX Accessibility Guidelines.
In the Problems, Exercises, and Tools chapter, the section about accessing open response assessment information has been updated to include a topic with details about removing a student response from peer grading. For more information, see Remove a Learner’s Response.
This guide now includes a new section about creating different course experiences for learners who are assigned to different cohorts. For more information, see Creating Cohort-Specific Course Content.
To support packaged releases for Open edX better, the source files for the
Open edX Developer’s Guide are now located in the GitHub
edx-documentation repository.
Answers to frequently asked questions about the edX mobile app are now available in the If You Use the edX Mobile App section of this guide.
This guide now includes new chapters for Options for Installing edX Insights and Setting Up the Open edX Mobile Applications.
This guide now includes a description of the new Email Opt In Report.
Version 1 of the Open edX Enrollment API guide is now available.
Updated information is available for video events that the edX mobile app emits. See the Events in the Tracking Logs chapter.
The initial, version 0 Alpha of the Open edX Data Analytics API Version 0 guide is now published.