Hello everyone,
I’d like to highlight an issue we recently faced with one of our clients, and I think it may point to an area in Open edX where the default behavior could be improved.
The situation we observed
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A course was created in 2022 with a course start date set in 2024.
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No enrollment start date or enrollment end date was configured in Studio.
What happened:
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Students were able to enroll in the course immediately from 2022 onward, even though the course itself was not supposed to start until 2024.
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As expected, these students could not actually perform activities or access content until the course start date arrived.
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However, their enrollments were still recorded in the system, so when the course team later advertised the course for pre-enrollment in 2024, they were surprised to already see ~100 students enrolled from earlier years.
Why this is confusing
For new course teams and institutions, this behavior is very unintuitive:
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The natural assumption is that if you leave enrollment start date blank, enrollment will only open at the same time as the course start date.
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Instead, the platform silently defaults to “enrollment is open immediately,” which can cause enrollments years before the actual launch.
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To instructors or administrators, this looks like a bug or misconfiguration. In our client’s case, they thought the dashboard was showing incorrect data because they hadn’t advertised the course yet.
Possible explanations
From testing, we see two scenarios that could cause this:
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Enrollment dates not set — When no enrollment start date is defined, Open edX assumes enrollment is open from course creation time.
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Course was previously active — If the course was ever launched before, those earlier enrollments remain even if the course is relaunched later for a new run.
In our case, it seems more likely that the first scenario applied, since the students could enroll but could not actually perform any activities before the course start.
Why this matters
This is not technically a bug, but it creates confusion for both instructors and learners:
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Instructors see unexplained early enrollments.
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Learners may be able to “join” a course but then find that they cannot do anything, which is a poor experience.
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For organizations running multiple MOOCs, this can create misleading enrollment reports and complicate relaunches.
Suggested improvement
A more intuitive default would be:
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If a course has a future start date and the enrollment start date is left blank, the system should default enrollment start to the course start date, OR
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At minimum, Studio should prompt course authors to explicitly set enrollment dates when scheduling a course.
This way, course teams won’t be surprised by early enrollments, and learners won’t be confused by being able to enroll in a course they cannot yet access.
Question to the community
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Have others run into this same situation?
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Would the community support adjusting this default behavior, or at least making it more explicit in Studio?
Would love to make a PR for this once i get community views about it
Thanks,