Open edX® Ironwood Release – What’s new?

The six months of work include changes that contain several new features for learners, course teams, and developers.

Authoring Improvements Release Notes

In the new gradebook, instructors can view and manage grades of all students in a course. Besides, the improved search will provide the ability to find specific learners. The other update in this section is the new filter by cohort, track, or assignment type.

Studio checklist was the manual feature, stopped in 2015. But in this release feature was reintroduced and now automatically detects completion status for authors. This update also includes the best practices checklist, that shows the current number of completed items.

Revenue Generation Release Notes

Feature-based enrollments this is the new revenue model of edx.org, that allows course owners to define what features are available for free track learners. If the FBE is enabled, audit learners will have access to core course content.

Course authors can configure these parameters for only verified learners, who will have access to graded problems and unlimited access to course content. This functionality is off by default on the platform level and configured additionally.

Learner Experience & Mobile Release Notes

The new release Open edX platform introduces enhanced language support programs, and now course certificates localized into the course language. Besides, certificates have the new hours of effort field.

Another update is Transferable Learner Records. Certificates are a kind of digital diploma, while the learner record is a credential representation that is digitally similar to a transcript. The views include sharable assessment information and can be configured by the discovery service using a new concept of paths associated with one or more programs.

In the Ironwood release, learners can access course content anonymous without logging in the learning environment. The content visibility customized by authors on three different access levels:

• Private

• Public plan

• Public

Major updates in the mobile application include:

• This release has improved landscape and rotation support. It was a key driver of lower ratings and reviews, because mobile learners use tablets, in particular iPad devices.

• For web course discovery mobile apps, there is a way to add native cards that let users jump to a specific course discovery view.

• The new area of program fragment views enables learners to view their program dashboard and program progress pages, just as they do on the web browser experience.

Want to know more about Open edX and why we believe it’s a great LMS technology? Check out our blog posts on the topic:

• Why You Should Choose the Open edX® Platform?
• Open edX: What Is It And Why 19 Million People Use It?

References:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=57&v=VjV1UKnRDB8&feature=emb_logo

https://edx.readthedocs.io/projects/open-edx-release-notes/en/latest/ironwood.html