We are proud to inform you that our ongoing work on Open edX platform improvement has brought new results. One of Raccoon Gang’s team members has developed a new Open edX feature, which was recently merged to the main platform with a GitHub pull request. This functionality helps simplify course creation and management, as it shows the XBlock location ID in the Studio.
This may seem small at first, yet this functionality was long-awaited and requested by the Open edX developers community.
New Open edX® Video XBlock from Appsembler and Raccoon Gang
We are glad to be a partner of Appsembler in developing a great new Video XBlock for Open edX, currently available as a public beta. If used as a replacement for built-in Open edX video player, this XBlock can help solve the video-related issues MOOC providers and corporate learning specialists currently face.
This detailed article from Appsembler highlights the currently existing approaches to working with Open edX video files, as well as listing pros and cons of each approach. It goes on with describing the conclusions gained from analysis of said approaches and the proposed solution a group of partners came up with. As the article states, we were among the main developers of the new Open edX video XBlock and we are pleased to apply our capabilities and expertise to this project.
The new XBlock’s main improvement, as compared to the built-in module, is the ability to use videos hosted on various video hosting resources like Vimeo, Brightcove, Wistia, etc. Other features are listed below:
- Brightcove, Wistia* and Vimeo* video content can be added simply by pasting the URL
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Interactive transcript and multi-lingual captions, including downloadable transcripts
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Speed up / slow down controls
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Downloadable handouts
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3PlayMedia integration to fetch subtitles that are stored at 3PlayMedia
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Secure video content by providing Brightcove credentials (when authoring)
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Ability to specify a particular Brightcove player ID on a per-block basis.
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“Pluggable” backend meaning that additional video hosting providers can be added
* Some features are still under development.
We are looking forward to further improving the Open edX platform and collaborating with Appsembler and other companies to develop even more exciting and useful features!
