"Course is new" advanced setting not affecting course card

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1

Hi everyone,

I was checking the “Course is new” advanced setting in Open edX Studio, but I couldn’t find any official documentation explaining how it works.

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I found a reference in an OpenCraft course:
https://apps.courses.opencraft.com/learning/course/course-v1:HarvardX+StudioAdv1+2T2019/block-v1:HarvardX+StudioAdv1+2T2019+type@sequential+block@601da3ebae9f48acbab03ea6b6ef4d61/block-v1:HarvardX+StudioAdv1+2T2019+type@vertical+block@14c852438d0f42a49051a0ceeaf3bd6d

It mentions that when Course is new = true, the course should appear as New and show a badge on the course card.

What I tested

  • Created a new course

  • Set Course is new = true in Advanced Settings

  • Republished the course

  • Tested on local, staging, and Edly sandbox environments

I tested this across different Open edX releases:

  • Teak

  • Ulmo

Expected behavior

  • Course card should display a New badge

  • Course should appear in new courses list

Actual behavior

  • No UI change

  • No badge displayed

  • No visible effect anywhere

From testing, it seems this flag only intended to affect a UI badge, but currently it does not change anything.

Is this flag still supported, or is there any additional configuration required for it to work?

2

Hi @Meet_Boghani - when making a post, could you kindly be sure to specify which Open edX release you’re running? And in this case, it would be helpful to know if you’re using the new Catalog MFE.

3

Hi @sarina thanks for pointing this out, I have updated the post. About version it’s teak and ulmo. Regarding the catalog mfe, currently we are not using that.

4

Hmm… doing some quick digging, I think it’s possible the is_new setting isn’t actually used anywhere in the codebase, unfortunately.

Tagging @Peter_Kulko since he worked on the Catalog MFE and is perhaps familiar with the API used in the course catalog.

5

Hey, @Peter_Kulko any insights would be helpful related to “Course is new” advanced setting in Open edX Studio.

6

Hi @Meet_Boghani - we did some code spelunking and it looks like functionality for Course Is New was dropped awhile ago, but the advanced setting remained (but not hooked up to anything). We’re going to issue a DEPR to remove this setting. Implementing it would be a big lift that we don’t have capacity for, and would involve:

  • Exposing the “is_new” in platform APIs
  • Creating a design for a “new” flag on course card
  • Consuming the “is_new” flag in the Catalog MFE, and implementing the new design to show on the course card
  • Updating edx-search to change the way that sorting works to somehow “expose” the new courses
  • Consuming the changes to edx-search in the Catalog MFE
7

@sarina Thank you for the response, this is understandable now.

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The DEPR is here: [DEPR]: Unused "Course is New" setting · Issue #38360 · openedx/openedx-platform · GitHub