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edX Insights

The initial version of edX Insights, our new course analytics product, is now available. In this release, edX Insights provides data for student enrollment activity, geographic location, and engagement with course content.

Team members who have the Instructor or Course Staff role can open edX Insights from the Instructor Dashboard. A banner announcing this new product displays at the top of every page: click the visit edX Insights link to view data about your course.

EdX Insights uses visualizations, key metrics, and tables to present data about who your students are and what they do while interacting with your course.

For example, the Weekly Student Engagement chart displays the number of students who engaged in different activities over time.

A line graph with three lines showing ongoing, differing levels of student activity of any kind, students who watched a video, and students who tried a problem.

To report where your students are, edX Insights shows a color-coded map.

A world map; countries with darker shading have a higher number of students than those with lighter shading.

You can use the data that is available from edX Insights to monitor activity, validate choices, reveal unexpected patterns, form hypotheses, and inform plans for your course. For information about edX Insights, see `Using edX Insights`_.

  • Each page of the edX Insights user interface now includes a link to context- sensitive help. Click Help in the upper-right corner of any page to access relevant sections of the Using edX Insights guide. You can also download the entire guide as a PDF.
  • In edX Insights, course authors can now view demographic data for students enrolled in their courses. Self-reported age, education, and gender data is available to view as histograms, metrics, and in tables, and is also available for download in .csv format.
  • The enrollment activity chart is now a stacked area chart that indicates the total number of enrolled learners on a particular date. For courses that offer more than one enrollment option or track, the enrollment activity chart uses different colors to represent the number of students who are enrolled with each option.

edX Learning Management System

  • The styling of LTI components is updated to better show links to external resources, as shown in the following example:

    The external resource link in an LTI component

  • When a user flagged a post in a closed discussion thread, an error message was displayed. This problem is now fixed. (TNL-151)

  • When submitting a numerical answer in Internet Explorer 9, students received a warning message that MathJax could not be read. This problem is now fixed. (BLD-1199)

  • On the Discussions tab, an error message sometimes appeared when you clicked through the thread list quickly. This bug has been fixed.

  • A "Page Not Found" error that could occur in some circumstances has been fixed. Previously, if a student closed the browser window after viewing a course section, and the course team later made that section unavailable, the error could occur when the student returned to the course section. (LMS-6492)

  • If a student changed the playback speed of a video in Firefox, the video did not play. This bug has been fixed. (BLD-1221)

  • To help course teams protect video assets, the edX video player now hides video URLs from students by default. This functionality is now in effect for all video files, including those that are not hosted on YouTube. Students can still download videos if you have selected the Video Download Allowed option for your Video components. (TNL-302)

  • An issue in which the char function caused some MATLAB problems to become unresponsive has been fixed. (TNL-388)

  • Answers to a text input problem with a long input string did not render properly. This issue is fixed. (TNL-441)

  • Python-evaluated input problems can now give partial, or decimal, grades for submissions. (TNL-198)

  • Full screen image components did not render correctly in Chrome. This issue is fixed. (TNL-265)

  • The private discussion cohorts feature has been released! When this optional feature is enabled for a course, the course team defines smaller communities of students within the larger, course-wide community. This feature allows course teams to divide students into cohort groups using either distinctive group characteristics or automated, random assignments. When the cohorts feature is enabled for a course, most discussion topics are divided so that students can only read and contribute to posts made by other members of the same cohort. However, course teams can create some open, or unified, discussion topics so that all students can read and contribute to that topic. Additionally, if the cohorts feature is enabled for the course, the CSV file that contains student profile data now includes a Cohort column.

    If you want to use the cohorts feature in your course, we strongly recommend that you implement the feature before your course is released. We do not recommend enabling cohorts in a running course.

    For more information, see `Cohorts`_.

  • In the Instructor Dashboard, downloading student profile data is now a background task. You can leave the Data Download page after you begin downloading students' profile information and return when the download is complete. Additionally, the Download profile information as a CSV button and the List enrolled students' profile information button have been moved to the Reports section of the Data Download page. (TNL-453)

  • Course discussions have several new features:

    • Students can now change the topic of a post after they post it. Discussion administrators, moderators, and community TAs can edit the topic for any post.
    • Users no longer have the option to add comments to closed threads. (TNL-150)
    • When a user selects a topic for a post, a link to the unit that contains that discussion topic in the body of the course now appears immediately when the post is created. (TNL-404)
    • Users who have the discussion admin role can now remove their own or other users' discussion admin status. (TNL-315)
    • For some users, a list of posts did not appear in the left sidebar when the user clicked Posts I'm Following. This bug has been fixed. (TNL-469)
    • Pinned posts now always appear at the top of the list of posts, regardless of the way that the posts are sorted. (TNL-90)

  • In some browsers, if a student clicked a word in a transcript to move to that point in the video, the video began playing from the correct point, but the transcript stopped following along with the video. This bug has been fixed. (TNL-235)

  • In Firefox and Safari browsers, after a student changed the video speed, videos in other units still played at the default speed, 1.0X. This problem is fixed and videos in other units play at the selected speed. (TNL-537)

  • For improved accessibility, the progress meter in the video player now has three additional aria state attributes: aria-valuemax, aria-valuemin, and aria-valuenow. (TNL-89)

  • The problem status after a student checks or shows an answer is now accessible to screen readers. (TNL-568, TNL-588, TNL-595)

  • For courses using content experiments, the edX platform now supports problem components in graded subsections and grade exports. (TNL-41)

  • When a problem contained a link to courseware, users who followed the link received a "page not found" error. This problem has been fixed. (TNL-729)

  • When a checkbox problem had no correct answer options, students who correctly selected none of the answer options and clicked Check saw a green check mark, but did not receive points for completing the problem correctly. This problem has been fixed. (TNL-765)

  • A problem with the spacing in the Discussion page search box in Arabic has been fixed. (OSPR-183)

  • Course demographic data is no longer available on the Analytics page of the Instructor Dashboard. For charts, metrics, and reports of student demographics, visit edX Insights.

  • Long component titles were not properly displayed in hover text and required horizontal scrolling. This problem is resolved. (TNL-406)

  • In Firefox browsers, the video player HD button did not appear. This problem is resolved. (TNL-536)

  • On the Instructor Dashboard, some tooltips appeared far away from the associated controls. This problem has been fixed. (TNL-558)

  • In the course discussions, the Vote button was still available even when the thread was closed. This problem has been fixed. (TNL-152)

  • Course staff can now assign students to cohorts by uploading a CSV file of students and their cohort assignments. See `Assign Students to Cohort Groups by Uploading a CSV File`_ for more information. (TNL-735)

  • In the Instructor Dashboard, when you unenrolled a student who enrolled in the Verified track, if that student was re-enrolled, he or she was automatically placed in the Verified track. This problem is fixed; the student is no longer automatically enrolled in the Verified track. (ECOM-776)

  • The Student Dashboard is updated to provide a visual indication of professional education courses the student is enrolled in. (ECOM-728)

  • The grade report available in the Instructor Dashboard now includes columns for the content experiment groups and cohorts to which students belong. (TNL-498)

  • When a pagination button is visually disabled, the button is now also disabled for screen readers. (TNL-997)

  • When students checked their answers to a custom response problem with 10 or more inputs, the responses were not sorted correctly. This problem is resolved. (TNL-952)

  • For numerical response problems, if the tolerance was set to greater than 0.1, answers that varied from the correct answer by an amount equal to the tolerance were marked incorrect; that is, the correct answer was no inclusive of the tolerance setting. This problem is resolved. (TNL-904)

edX Studio

  • When you import a course, a progress bar now shows the import progress. (STUD-2017)

  • The Adding Files for Your Course page now includes a recommendation to limit the size of individual files to 10 MB.

  • After you added a private YouTube video to your course, the video controls for later videos did not appear in Studio or in the LMS. This bug has been fixed. (TNL-184)

  • In HTML text components, the default font now appears as an option in the Font menu. (TNL-147)

    HTML component editor with Font menu open to show Default option

  • When a Problem component contained a custom JavaScript display and grading (JS Input) problem and at least one other problem, the JS Input problem was scored incorrectly. The additional problem in the component could be any type of problem. These problems are now scored correctly. (TNL-269)

  • When you exported a course, the setting for Video Download Allowed in a Video component changed from False to True in the exported course. This bug has been fixed. (TNL-324)

  • The format to set dates in the Advanced Settings for discussion blackouts is clarified on the page. You must enter dates as YYYY-MM-DD. To include the time, you enter YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM. Be sure to enter the T between the date and time.

  • The date and time on the Schedule and Details page are now shown as Universal Coordinated Times (UTC). (TNL-85)

  • The protein builder tool now correctly uses font sizing set by user browser preferences. (TNL-256)

  • Course staff now have the ability to add a Reset button to problems. Students can click Reset to clear any input that has not yet been submitted, and try again to answer the question. See `Show Reset Button`_.

  • The course outline interface has been enhanced. When you are working with units, the unit currently being viewed or edited is highlighted in the course outline panel on the right. (TNL-291)

  • The Course Export page now includes a warning that exported data includes sensitive information such as MATLAB API keys and LTI passports. (DOC-1138)

  • To correct problems with the appearance of non-ASCII characters in Studio, additional font files were installed. (TNL-395)

  • When you changed one course time, other course times were incorrectly changed. This problem is resolved. (TNL-772)

  • When users exported a course that contained a draft of an open response assessment problem, they received an error message. This problem has been fixed. (PLAT-249)

  • The size of files that you can upload in the Files & Uploads page is now limited to 10 MB. If you try to upload a file larger than 10 MB, Studio shows a message that the file is too large and could not be uploaded.

  • A problem that caused assignment weights in the grading policy to display incorrectly is resolved. (TNL-884)

  • Open response assessments now support right-to-left languages.

  • When a component with multiple parents had a draft version, you received an error when trying to export the course. This problem is resolved. (PLAT-332)

  • You can now use a new advanced setting, always_cohort_inline_discussions, to control whether content-specific discussion topics are unified or cohorted. See `Make All Content-Specific Discussion Topics Unified by Default`_ for more information.

  • The inline help for the Discussion Topic Mapping advanced setting is updated to note that discussion IDs must be unique. (TNL-752)

  • When you made multiple attempts to log in to edX Studio with the wrong password, the error message was not refreshed and there was no indication of the problem on subsequent attempts. This problem is resolved. (TNL-140)

edX Discussions

  • Forum moderators can now change the type of a discussion from a question to a post, and vice versa. Students can also change the type of discussion for their own posts. (TNL-172)
  • The default type for a new discussion is now a post. Previously, the default was a question.
  • When you enter a search term on the Discussion page, the search starts either when you click the magnifying glass icon or press the Enter key. Previously, only use of the Enter key started the search. (TNL-526)
  • After you mark a response to a question post as the correct answer, a message that describes this action is added to the response. The hyperlinked username in this message now correctly opens a new page showing your contributions to the course discussion. (TNL-188)
  • When you viewed responses in a discussion topic, the vote count was displayed twice. This problem is resolved. (TNL-1016)
  • After editing a discussion post or comment, a user was then not able to report the post or mark it as the answer. This problem is resolved. (TNL-1016)

edX Data & Analytics

  • For compatibility with database import tools, a field in the child_render event was renamed. The event member field is now named child_id instead of child-id.
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