How to model our Master’s → CE → Semesters structure in Open edX?

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1

Hi everyone,

We’re setting up Open edX for Ganpat University and I’m trying to figure out the cleanest way to map our academic structure into Open edX.

Our real‑world structure looks like this:

  • Master’s program (top‑level degree)

    • CE / Department

      • Semesters (1, 2, 3, …)

        • Individual courses/modules

I’m a bit confused about how best to represent this hierarchy using the standard Open edX pieces (Organization, Course, Course Run, maybe Programs/Discovery).

What I’m unsure about:

  • Should each department/CE be its own Organization, or is it better to have one Org for the university and use course numbers/IDs to encode department and semester?

  • Is there a recommended way to group all Semester‑1 courses together so a student clearly sees “these are my Sem 1 subjects”?

  • Are Programs in Discovery the right place to bundle “Master’s Program → Semester‑wise groups of courses”? If yes, how are people structuring that?

  • Has anyone implemented something similar to:

    • Master’s program

    • Department (like CE)

    • Semester

    • Individual courses
      and found a pattern that works well for navigation and reporting?

2

Hi @Ved_Patel and welcome to the forums. I saw in Best practices for hierarchical course structure: Master's -> CE -> Semesters (which it looks like you’ve deleted now) that you’re running on Tutor v17 (Quince (Dec 2023)), which is no longer supported. Could I ask why you’re not using the latest release, Ulmo? We only support releases for 6 months - including critical security patches - if you’re setting up a new site, why not go with the latest release?

With Ulmo, you can use the new Catalog MFE - GitHub - openedx/frontend-app-catalog · GitHub - which has great searching facet features over Organizations. You may be able to call “Organizations” something like “Departments” instead using translation overrides or plugin slots (I’m not sure how to do this, though).

Programs is probably the way to go around grouping courses, although I’m also not sure how that’s set up.