Open edX Release Eucalyptus is here!
If you haven’t heard, a couple weeks ago Open edX published a blog post announcing the latest named community release of Open edX, called Eucalyptus. This release brings a host of new features that extend the capabilities of Open edX in new and exciting ways. We encourage our readers to check out the Open edX Release Notes for some more detailed information on the Eucalyptus release.
At Appsembler, we plan on spotlighting the most exciting features individually in future blog posts to dive a little bit deeper into what they are and how they work. For now, check out this list of some new features that come with Eucalyptus:
- Per Learner Analytics – Activity metrics, including the number of videos viewed, discussion contributions made, and problems attempted, are now available for every enrolled learner.
- Open Response Assessments (ORA) now have staff grading capability out-of-the-box! You can also now generate reports of all learners’ responses.
- Badges – Create and award badges for students who reach certain milestones
- Bookmarks – To mark course content so that you can come back to it later, you can bookmark any course page, up to a limit of 100 bookmarks for one course.
- Creating self-paced courses is now easier than ever! No more need to mess with adjusting course start/end dates.
- The Course Info page is now called the Home page and includes important dates as well as news & updates.
- The CourseTalk widget allows learners to post course ratings and reviews that then appear on the course’s About page.
- Subsection Prerequisites – Require learners to achieve a certain score before they progress to the next subsection
- Teams – Give students the opportunity to work together on projects together on the topic of their choosing (from a list of topics you create, of course)
- New E-Commerce features! Watch this video to see how easy it is.
There are some new XBlocks as well, including Completion, a new version of Drag and Drop Problems, and Peer Instruction. We’ll delve into those a little deeper soon!
To Appsembler customers: As always with new releases, upgrading your site is a process that takes time. We conduct thorough testing of the new release, to make sure that your site continues to perform reliably and securely after the upgrade. Stay tuned for more information from us about scheduling times for upgrades.
