OLX Course Building Blocks

OLX Course Building Blocks#

Tags: educator concept

Before you begin using OLX (open learning XML) to set up a course, you should understand the building blocks of an Open edX course.

Courseware#

Courseware is the main content of your course and consists mainly of lessons and assessments. The following list describes how courseware is organized in OLX.

  • Course sections are at the top level of your course and typically represent a time period. In OLX, sections are defined in the chapter directory.

  • A section contains one or more children (“subsections”) which correspond to top-level pages in the course. In Studio, these are defined within sequential elements at this level.

    Note

    Technically, OLX supports any XBlock at this level. This is not guaranteed to work upon Studio import.

  • Courses are composed of structural elements, such as sequential (subsections), vertical (units), and leaf-nodes (content elements/components), such as html or problem. Studio has a fixed hierarchy where children of sequential elements are vertical elements (called units), and children of vertical elements are leaf elements (called components).

For more information, see The OLX Courseware Structure.

Supplemental Course Content#

In addition to the courseware described above, you course can contain supplemental content, such as textbooks, custom pages, and files. The following list describes the types of supported content.

  • Course about pages appear in the default Open edX course catalog for prospective students and are used to market your course. For more information, see Create Course Overview in OLX.

  • Course assets are any supplemental files you use in your course, such as a syllabus as a PDF file or an image that appears in an HTML component. For more information, see Create Course Assets in OLX.

  • Course pages are custom pages that you can have appear in the top navigation menu of your course. For more information, see Create tabs, or pages, in your course.

Course Policies#

Course policies determine how your course functions. For example, policies control grading and content experiments. For more information, see Create OLX Course Policies.

See also

What is Open Learning XML? (concept)

Course Components (XBlocks) (reference)

Components & Activities (reference)

The OLX Courseware Structure (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

Pass
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