Educators, if you could add any feature to Open edX, what would it be?
We’re collecting ideas for new features—and we want your input! If there’s something that slows you down, creates friction for your team, or makes learning more difficult for your students, we want to hear about it.
Whether it’s a small annoyance or a big missing piece, let us know what would make your work easier or your courses better. We’ll turn the most popular ideas into product proposals—an effective way to spark collaboration and increase the chances of a feature being built.
Please drop your feature ideas in the thread below.
Course start and end date relative due dates. Ie being able to set up a course with due dates that are say “1 week + start date” etc. And being able to added dates to texts and instructional content that change relative to when the course is launched or ends. Say like having some persistent variables that can be passed through from settings to the text editors. Like a datetime variable.
Hello everyone. Please add a learner activity chart that can also be viewed by course staff. I believe this is feasible, as there is already debug information available for staff to view individual students, but the current implementation is somewhat inconvenient. It would be great to have this in the form of a visual chart. This feature would also be beneficial for instructors, as it would allow them to confirm that a learner has been diligently working on assignments over the allotted time, rather than completing everything in a single night.
@danbrac Welcome to the forum! It’s good to have you here.
Thanks for your feedback. I’m glad you mentioned relative due dates; it’s a good one to add to our list!
I’m interested to find out more about your idea to add dates to texts/instructional content. Would the goal be to set ‘mini-deadlines’ throughout the course, requiring students to complete certain parts of the course by specific dates within the overall timeline? I want to make sure I understand what you have in mind before putting it forward to the Community.
I love the idea of mini-deadlines. Being able to apply deadlines within an overall longer-term deadline would be very helpful for some of my courses.
In regards to the “datetime” type implementation, I was more thinking about how for some text fields, it is nice to write in a deadline of a part of the course to remind learners as they go through the content without needing to check the dates page. Right now, I would have to manually update these inclusions of dates for future runs, but if it were tied back to a global variable, then I could spend time on updating problems and content rather than dates and text for re-runs
@rploggen Thanks for sharing your idea about exporting content in an open format. It sounds like it would be useful functionality. I’ve added it to the ideas list!
We are working on Common Cartridge import currently, it should debut in Teak. We have a bit of a constraint that the Open edX format doesn’t 100% map to Common Cartridge so import/export to other formats may not ever be as complete as we want it to be.
Thank you for bringing my attention to the limitations of timed exams. I’ll take a closer look through your original post to better understand how the feature could be improved.
Ooh, ooh, call on me! (Pulls out 3-ring binder, blows the dust off it)
Grading
I’d love to see a more flexible grading system in edX. Everyone eventually gets used to the current one, but it was designed for the first course ever run on the platform and everything else kind of gets wedged into it. A few specific things that would help:
Right now you can weight assignment types, drop subsections, and weight individual problems. Make it so you can weight and drop all of those.
A “points is points” approach where the platform doesn’t bother involving subsections or types at all, and each problem is just worth the number of points it says it is.
Assigning individual problems to types instead of whole subsections, so that you can assess learners by topic instead of by location in the course.
Teams
There’s a poll in the Slack #wg-educators channel about this, so I won’t go into tons of detail here. If you’re curious, we had a course that we were going to run on edx.org but didn’t for lack of team-based features. We had several rounds of discussion with edX that went nowhere when people left the company and institutional knowledge evaporated. We got all the way to a scope of work. Feel free to e-mail me for more if you want.
Student Data Store
I have a way to store learner-specific data in edX with Javascript. (Live-development thread here on this forum, slides from a presentation that I’ve given at the Open edX conference, instructions in the JSInput repo.) It’s a messy workaround that would make Rube Goldberg proud, but it’s the only way to do it. I’d love to have this be easier.
Discussions
There’s a vast swath of forum features that would be helpful, especially on the moderation side. We got together with MIT way back before the pandemic to create a unified list.
APIs
I have a tool that downloads all our courses. It has to use web automation to open every download page one by one, click the button, wait, check for the next button, etc. Similarly, I have a tool that adds and removes people from our staff. Same thing - it’s web automation that breaks every time the Course Team page changes, because that page doesn’t even have sensible IDs for its controls any more.
Please: APIs. If I can build these tools to use REST APIs instead of web automation, it’ll take a quarter as long to write them and they’ll run ten times faster.
Other useful items
Prerequisite courses
Split the Staff role into Author and Instructor (I think this might already be underway)
Multi-course reports in Insights (or more likely its lovely successor whose name I’m forgetting)
Course build history and rollback
Register-once functionality for LTI tools, because when you have a course with 135 instances of one tool and have to register it 135 times that’s a lot.
Cohorts, Teams, A/B testing, and content visibility are all weirdly overlapping and take a fair amount of explaining. Smoothing out all of that would be a lot of work, so I’m assuming it’s not in the cards, but I figured I might as well mention it.
The MFE approach has been very successful in a lot of ways. I am a fan of the project. However, it’s very slow to use on the authoring side, partly because it involves two page loads every time you edit a component. I’d love to see it sped up.
@sarina Am I right in assuming that importing and exporting would be separate efforts, and that the current Common Cartridge Import work doesn’t include anything related to exporting? If so, is exporting something that’s on our radar?
Please drop your feature ideas in the thread below.
