Discussions in openedx

We are trying to explore openedx for our requirements.
One thing I see is discussions in openedx is tied to a course. We have a requirement to enable open discussions not tied to a particular course. Is it possible to do so in openedx?

To my knowledge, no. It’s not possible at least not as out of the box set up.

If I might ask, in what contex do learners want to discuss outsdie the course? is it program? platform support?..etc. One use I think of personally to commuicate outside the course generally, and if you would want to use discourse.org as forum (like this) check this post to connect it with Open edX via SSO

There is support for third party forums experiences in Open edX. They still get accessed through the discussions tab of a course, but you might be able to create one actual forums instance and then point a bunch of different courses at it.

I haven’t actually run any of these though. Maybe someone who’s run them could chime in on this thread…?

It is not possible as of today.

Method that @dave described can work. You can create a community/instance within the 3rd party tool and sprinkle a link to that in various courses.

Note that the 4 discussion tools configureable via the “Pages & resources” page work on LTI 1.1. If you want to use LTI 1.3 for the same tools, you may be able to do that using the LTI xblock.