Open edX Redwood Release (June 2024)

Welcome to the Redwood release! Discover new and exciting features built for authors, learners, and site operators. Here’s what’s ready for you now:

🧑‍🏫 For Course Authors

Taxonomies and Tags for Easy Organization and Reuse: Add structured tags from any third-party taxonomy (or create your own) to courses, units, problems, and videos — then search by tag to quickly find and reuse content across courses, align to certifications, or track learning outcomes.

Meet Aspects: Analytics Built Right Into Open edX: Access near real-time enrollment, engagement, and performance data through interactive dashboards directly from the Instructor Dashboard, no separate login required! With downloadable reports, cross-filtering, and at-risk learner identification, you’ll be able to quickly adapt to the needs of your learners.

Find Any Content in Seconds with Course Search (limited release): Search across all your courses (or within one) to instantly locate videos, problems, or text by keyword or tag — then copy and reuse content in just a few clicks, saving hours of hunting through course outlines.

Studio Gets a Complete Makeover: Studio now features a sleek, modernized interface, delivering a consistent, cohesive authoring experience across every page and workflow, built with authoring efficiency in mind.

Share Course Sections Independently: Hide sections from your course outline while sharing direct URLs to them — perfect for distributing evergreen resources, supplemental materials, or reference content that learners need to access throughout the course.

🎓 For Learners

Navigate Your Way With the New Sidebar Navigation (limited release): Learners can now jump to any unit, section, or subsection without returning to the Course Outline page — with visual progress indicators and completion checkmarks that update in real-time as they work through content.

⚙️ For Site Operators

Aspects is an analytics system for the Open edX platform, bringing actionable data about course and learner performance to instructors and site operators. It must be installed separatly from the Open edX platform, and in future releases will unlock capabilities such as course comparison dashboards and Studio in-context metrics.

🔮 Upcoming in Sumac (December 2024)

We’re working hard on even more improvements in our Sumac release (out now)! You can look forward to:

Libraries: Your Content, Reimagined: Store unlimited content in one Library instead of juggling dozens, then reuse individual problems, videos, or text blocks across any course with one-click updates. Create randomized problem banks, organize with Collections and tags, and sync changes instantly across all your courses.

Compare Courses at a Glance with Aspects: Spot enrollment trends, gauge problem difficulty, and compare performance across all your courses or runs in one dashboard, complete with sortable tables, course tag filters, and quick links to drill deeper into individual course data.

Navigate Your Way: New Sidebar Navigation: In Sumac, we’ll debut a fully featured, default sidebar navigation experience enabling users to seamlessly navigate through courses within the courseware experience.

Enhanced Mobile App Experience: Single sign-on, improved translations experience, a new Course Home experience, and more!

⌚ Ready to Upgrade?

Have your site operations team check out the Tutor upgrading guide so they can upgrade your Open edX instance to the Redwood release!

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