Discussion Components in OLX

Discussion Components in OLX#

Tags: educator reference

Warning

This page refers to the older discussion forums (pre-Olive release) and is deprecated for post-Olive releases.

For Olive and newer releases, discussion components are automatically created for each ungraded unit. To enable discussion on graded units, the behavior can be overridden via the discussions_settings attribute on the course object in the course/run.xml file.

Here is an example of discussions_settings with enable_graded_units set to true:

discussions_settings=
  "{"enable_graded_units": true,
  "enable_in_context": true,
  "provider_type": "openedx",
  "unit_level_visibility": true,
  "posting_restrictions": "disabled",
  "openedx": {"group_at_subsection": false}}"

The UI for discussions configuration can be found under the Content > Pages & Resources menu in Studio.

You can add inline Discussion components to any container in your course.

Create the XML File for a Discussion Component#

There are two ways to create an inline discussion component in your course. The preferred way is to include a discussion tag inside a vertical, as demonstrated in the following example.

<vertical display_name="Lesson_1_Unit_1">
  ...
  <discussion
    display_name="Peer Grading"
    discussion_category="Essays"
    discussion_target="Peer Grading"
    discussion_id="unique_id_here"
  />
</vertical>

The second way, which is deprecated, is to create an XML file in the discussion directory for each inline discussion component in your course, and to then reference XML file in a discussion tag inside a vertical, as shown in the following example.

The following is inside a vertical:

<vertical display_name="Lesson_1_Unit_1">
  <discussion
    url_name="Peer_Grading"
  />
</vertical>

Create the file discussion/Peer_Grading.xml to define the inline discussion component, containing the following code.

<discussion
  display_name="Peer Grading"
  discussion_category="Essays"
  discussion_target="Peer Grading"
  discussion_id="unique_id_here"
/>

Note that the name of the XML file must match the value of the @url_name attribute of the discussion element in the vertical XML file.

Discussion Component XML File Elements#

The root element of the XML file for the discussion component file is discussion.

The discussion element contains no children.

discussion Element Attributes#

Attribute

Meaning

Required. discussion_category

The name of the category for the inline discussion as shown in the main Discussion tab of the course. For example: Problem Set 1

Required. discussion_target

The name of the subcategory for the inline discussion as shown in the Discussion tab of the course. For example: Problem 2

display_name

Optional. The value that is displayed to learners as the name of the discussion component. If you do not supply a display_name value, “Discussion” is supplied for you.

Optional. discussion_id

The unique identifier that the discussion forum service uses to refer to this inline discussion component. This value must be unique across all courses in an Open edX deployment. We recommend that you leave this value blank so that a unique identifier is automatically generated.

Obsolete. id

Use discussion_id instead.

Obsolete. for

Use discussion_target instead.

Example Discussion Component XML File#

The following example shows an XML file for a discussion component.

<discussion
    discussion_category="Essays"
    discussion_target="Peer Grading"
    display_name="Peer Grading"
 />

See also

What is Open Learning XML? (concept)

About Course Discussions (concept)

Example of an OLX Course (reference)

Getting Started with OLX (quickstart)

What is the OLX Course Structure? (reference)

Maintenance chart

Review Date

Working Group Reviewer

Release

Test situation

2025-11-06

sarina

Ulmo

Deprecated
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