OpenCraft is proposing an XBlock-based solution to automate the grading of student participation in discussions. We’d love to hear your thoughts - especially from educators.
Would this tool add value to your courses? Vote here.
It would be great if CC’s could share this call for feature ideas with the educators in their network. Or if CC’s could respond on the thread with ideas of their own!
As a CC, check for PRs that are stuck and need attention. Don’t have write access? No problem! You can still help by reviewing to move things forward. Ping Axim if there are issues merging after you review.
Below is a list of stalled PRs that need urgent attention:
Credly integration is delayed; users can’t view badges in the LMS. An alternative, POK (Argentinian solution with blockchain credentials), will be presented by Esteban. BigBlueButton and Turnitin integrations face technical issues. GoReact + WGU partnership highlighted. AWS Academy offers LTI integration opportunity—potential pilot needed. Latest meeting notes → 2025-04-09 Partnership development Meeting
Teak’s cutoff date moved to April 24; all key roles (security patcher, testing coordinator) are now filled. React 18 upgrade no longer a blocker. Forums v2 migration has bugs (2U/MIT), but not blocking release. May 6: Virtual Release Test-a-thon planned. Ongoing work on Tutor Indigo theme and feature flag collection. Latest meeting notes → 2025-04-14 BTR Meeting Minutes
The board reviewed key items, including improving feedback processes and working group updates, with progress in OPR management and automation. The partners as maintainers topic is almost resolved but still needs final approval. The Open edX Handbook is ready for implementation. Latest meeting notes → 2025-03-18 CC Working Group Meeting Notes
Product release notes for new user-facing features should be added to the Teak Product Release Notes space in the wiki. Smaller improvements and bug fixes should be added to the Potpourri page by May 30th. Additionally, there will be a follow-up Design Sprint Workshop for the Global Administrative Console of the Open edX platform on Monday, April 14th during the UI/UX Workshop slot. Latest meeting notes → 2025-04-08 Core Product Meeting Notes
The Data Working Group discussed improving in-context analytics in Studio, focusing on accessibility (chart contrast), clearer chart titles, and linking to a user guide. There was also a conversation about improving analytics for multi-part problems submitted with one button. More granular data will likely be addressed in the Ulmo release. Latest meeting notes → 2025-03-05 Meeting notes
The Programs dashboard is a legacy page with no current DEPR or MFE replacement, though it might be integrated into the learner dashboard MFE in the future. Its API could be improved to prepare for migration, ideally after the Studio frontends deprecation. The new codejail-service is nearing readiness and may be merged into one repo. 2U/Arch-BOM will write the DEPR for codejail but won’t maintain it long-term. Latest meeting notes → DEPR Meetings Notes (2025)
The Open edX Handbook proposal was accepted in late 2024. Cassie is now refining the structure and seeking feedback from the Documentation WG. Latest meeting notes → 2025-04-02 Docs WG
Key topics for the upcoming meeting include improving alert button styling via design tokens, clarifying devDependencies usage, exploring RSBuild for better build performance, and auto-generating TypeScript types from OpenAPI schemas. Latest meeting notes → 2025-04-10 Frontend Working Group Meeting Notes
Maria Fernanda shared updates on 1EdTech testing and proposed a technical approach for LTI consumer improvements. Igor from Raccoongang discussed enhancing LTI for single authentication across resources. Latest meeting notes → 2025-04-01 Meeting notes
All Tutor-supported MFEs are now on React 18. Django upgrade is progressing, with focus on resolving index_together syntax issues. Discussions included 2U team responsibilities, updates to the deprecation process, and follow-ups on name-affirmation and brand-edx.org maintenance. Latest meeting notes → 2025-04-10 Meeting notes
Upcoming events include Educause 2025 (Edly, Intela, Aulasneo, DRC), Learn in Saudi Arabia (DRC, eduNEXT, Edly), and GITEX Asia (Edly). The next Open edX Meetup is in May, just before the Open edX Conference. G2M presentation moved to May 7; sponsors still needed—marketing updates and OKR review ongoing. Latest meeting notes →Agenda, April 16th, 2025
A new Mission Aligned Organization may join Open edX, and membership in UNESCO’s Global Education Coalition is being considered. WGU officially joined as a contributing partner, while the “Partners as Maintainers” proposal sparked discussion around commitment levels and governance. The forums service successfully migrated from Ruby/MongoDB to Python/MySQL, reducing tech debt and simplifying maintenance. Latest meeting notes → TOC Meeting Notes - 2025-03-12
The language performance declined following the transition from the edx-platform to the openedx-translations project. Machine translations are now active for all languages except Portuguese (Portugal). Latest meeting notes → 2025-04-16 Translation WG Meeting
Want to participate in Core Contributor Governance?
Join us for the next Contributor Coordination Working Group Meeting on Tuesday, May 13th to collaborate on planning and aligning contributor efforts. We’re working on some exciting projects, and we’d love your input. Help us shape the future of Open edX!Add the meeting to your calendar
Anything to add?
Share your thoughts in Slack (openedx.slack.com) or the comments below!
So glad to see this finally in action! It’s been a long road If any CC’s have feedback on the new format let us know here.
@Natalia_Choconta We also wanted to track if there is more engagement now that we’ve rolled out the new template. Could you keep track of this too and update me after a 3-month period perhaps? I’m also hoping that we link to this from the Open edX newsletter we’re rolling out
@itsjeyd@Michelle_Philbrick The same as the above - if more tickets start getting reviewed. I also asked @ehuthmacher if we can include the list of PRs in the newsletter template. So that may help as well
Absolutely @Cassie ! I’ll be tracking engagement over the next 3 months and will share an update with you at the end of that period.
Thanks so much for the feedback @sarina! I’ll make sure to add the suggested line spacing in the next report to improve readability, especially for email viewers.
Also, thanks for the correction regarding the Teak timeline. I’ve updated the information and replaced the link with the one you recommended.
@itsjeyd The list of stuck PR shows some pretty old PR - the oldest two being from 2023 (2nd PR), and don’t look too big or controversial? Are there for those to have been there for so long? What could we do to unblock them? The rest of the 10 PRs from the list are from 2024 still…
Thanks a lot @Cassie! I’m not completely sure how we’d formally track
if more tickets start getting reviewed.
However I’ll definitely keep an eye out for CCs offering to review PRs without being pinged by @Michelle_Philbrick or me first
@antoviaque If nobody picks them up after seeing this post, we could ping the #core-contributors and #wg-maintenance channels on Slack to get more eyes on them.
@itsjeyd Sounds good What do you think is the reason for MRs to remain open for so long? No clear maintainer for this part of edx-platform? Lack of visibility from core contributors? Something else?
I’m not aware of any recent efforts to establish maintainership for specific parts of the edx-platform repo (though it’s completely possible that I just missed the memo on that).
So yes, that is still a potential bottleneck when it comes to finding reviewers for edx-platform PRs specifically.
Not sure about this one, I think it depends a bit on how individual CCs approach finding PRs to review. I.e., do they go out and actively look for PRs they could help with? Or do they take a more passive approach and wait for someone to ping them directly?
I don’t know the answer to that question, but what I can say is that on the repos that I’m responsible for as OSPR manager, I haven’t really been seeing CCs take action independently and assign themselves as reviewers without being prompted.
From my recent experience, product review is still a bottleneck. The process is much more well-defined now than it used to be, but PRs still get stuck at that stage frequently.
PR authors often don’t initiate the process themselves, and/or don’t stay as proactive as the process requires them to be.
For PRs that only make small user-facing changes, my personal opinion is that the product review process is too complex. A simplified version requiring fewer steps and less coordination would make it possible to get these types of PRs merged much more quickly. (It might also be less intimidating for people who are new to the community.)
Another issue, I think, is that the volume of PRs against edx-platform is much larger than on other repos. This leads to fewer touchpoints from OSPR management for edx-platform – there’s only so many PRs that can be processed at a time, so if the number of PRs against a given repo is large it can take some time until we circle back around and have another look at each individual PR. This doesn’t negate the fact that it’s difficult to tell who to ping for review on PRs targeting different parts of edx-platform; but perhaps @Michelle_Philbrick and I could work out a new approach that would allow us to increase the number of touchpoints per PR.
Looking at the list of long-running PRs from the original post, there’s a couple more factors causing PRs to get stuck (I’ve come across these myself in the context of OSPR management):
@itsjeyd I agree with all of this. Product is still a bottleneck, and I don’t think it’s necessarily the process in most cases, but perhaps a capacity issue. Also, a huge +1 to the process being a bit complicated for the smaller updates. I do know that Jenna has approved a few of those to skip the full process and they just continue to review. Maybe when those pop up, we can send them directly to her, or post it the Product Slack channel to get feedback on whether it’s big enough to warrant the full process?
For edx-platform, I can check in on those more regularly if needed, that’s not an issue. The issue is getting the number of stalled PRs down. With edx-platform, there’s lots of PRs stuck needing review, some have been waiting for 6-12 months (and may not even be relevant anymore). The CCs do get occasional reminders to peek at the ones needing review, and we’re highlighting this issue more in the CC comms (like @Cassie is working on), so maybe this will start to improve a bit. I will also check internally with the Axim Eng team to get their thoughts on how to handle PRs that have beens stuck with no reviewers (regardless of repo).
For product review, I’d be in favor of posting on the Product Slack channel to maximize the number of people that would take note. (Which would probably include Jenna, so she could still provide feedback if she had capacity; but we’d be less dependent on a single person finding time to help out.)
I wonder if that could be incentivized somehow? Or organized, so that the prompting is more systematic and allows to get the PRs assigned more quickly?
Are there things we can do to facilitate the steps PR authors have to follow? Getting a PR merge will always require some level of proactivity, but if we can save them some steps or make them happen more quickly, that will likely help.
Also, often the motivation for an author to do work or reply on a MR is when they post it; it can quickly decrease with time, especially for new contributors - this could be a factor to take into account when trying to get better responses from authors.
Maybe there is a need to accommodate relatively small changes, so they can have a product review without requiring large budgets - otherwise we are missing on small features which don’t go all the way to have product/UX/etc resources? Maybe there could be a light version of the product review for those cases?
These PRs that are stuck, is it because of lack of skills/experience of reviewers for the parts of the code being affected? If nobody feels they have the expertise, nobody feels they can review, then in turn nobody gets stuff merged, so nobody builds experience.
So maybe we could have a kind of roster of core contributors who volunteer to take on MRs in a part of the codebase without good reviewers, giving them explicitly permission to merge code there, since nobody else will review anyway? This way the code can live again - and maybe people contributing to it will in term become maintainers?
It’s been a while since I reviewed it in detail but the proposed bot workflow from wg-coordination#152 could potentially help with making the prompting more systematic.
The first message that they get from the existing PR bot directly links them to the list of criteria for determining if their changes need product review, as well as the documentation for the product review process itself (example).
In addition, I’ve been posting additional comments on PRs that I’m certain will require product review, pointing that out to the authors and sending them to look at the documentation.
From the perspective of OSPR management, I’m not sure there’s much more we can do.
As currently defined, the product review process requires PR authors to initiate it; that is a hurdle they need to get over themselves.
If we want to lower that hurdle, I think we’ll have to look at ways to simplify the product review process (as you’re suggesting).
The product working group has a workshop planned for the first day of this year’s conference, and reviewing the product review process is part of the agenda. I have high hopes that this will bring changes along the lines you’re describing
Yes, though it’s still a “push” system more than a “pull” system - it’s about getting maintainers to help with assigning PRs to CCs, rather than encouraging CCs to self-assign.
What are we celebrating?
Who needs help?
Vote here.
What Pull Requests (PRs) need review?
What are the Working Groups up to?
What events are coming up?
Release cut: April 24 · Testing: Apr 25–Jun 8 · Launch: June 9, 2025. Open edX Releases Homepage
Want to participate in Core Contributor Governance?
Add the meeting to your calendar
Anything to add?
If any CC’s have feedback on the new format let us know 
