Preface

Course teams, researchers, developers, students: the edX community includes groups with a range of reasons for using the platform and objectives to accomplish. To help members of each group learn about what edX offers, reach goals, and solve problems, edX provides a variety of information resources.

To help you find what you need, browse the edX offerings in these categories:

All members of the edX community are encouraged to make use of any of the resources described in this preface.

System Status

For system-related notifications from the edX operations team, including outages and the status of error reports. On Twitter, you can follow @edxstatus.

Current system status and the uptime percentages for edX servers, along with the Twitter feed, are published on the edX Status web page.

Resources for Course Teams

Course teams include faculty, instructional designers, course staff, discussion moderators, and others who contribute to the creation and delivery of courses on edx.org or edX Edge.

Documentation

Documentation for course teams is available on the docs.edx.org web page.

  • Building and Running an edX Course is a comprehensive guide with concepts and procedures to help you build a course in edX Studio, and then use the Learning Management System (LMS) to run a course.

    When you are working in edX Studio, you can access relevant sections of this guide by clicking Help on any page.

  • edX Course Staff Release Notes summarize the changes in each new version of the edX Studio and LMS software.

  • Creating a Peer Assessment describes features for students to provide peer- and self- evaluations of responses to a question. Note that this new feature is in limited release.

These guides open in your web browser. The left side of each page includes a Search docs field and links to that guide’s contents. To open or save a PDF version, click v: latest at the lower left of the page, then click PDF.

Email

To receive and share information by email, course team members can:

  • Sign up to receive monthly newsletters.
  • Sign up to receive release notes for every release.
  • Join the openedx-studio Google group to ask questions and participate in discussions with peers at other edX partner organizations and edX staffers.

Wikis and Web Sites

The edX product team maintains the Open edX Product wiki, which includes the Open edX Public Product Roadmap.

The edX Author Support site hosts discussions that are monitored by edX staffers.

Resources for Researchers

Data for the courses on edx.org and edX Edge is available to the “data czars” at our partner institutions, and then used by database experts, statisticians, educational investigators, and others for educational research.

Documentation

The edX Research Guide is available on the docs.edx.org web page.

This guide opens in your web browser, with a Search docs field and links to that guide’s contents on the left side of each page. To open or save a PDF version, click v: latest at the lower left of the page, and then click PDF.

Email

To receive and share information by email, researchers can join the openedx-analytics Google group to ask questions and participate in discussions with peers at other edX partner organizations and edX staffers.

Wiki

The edX Analytics team maintains the Open edX Analytics wiki, which includes links to periodic release notes, the Open edX Public Product Roadmap, and other resources for researchers.

Resources for Developers

Software engineers, system administrators, and translators work on extending and localizing the code for the edX platform.

Documentation

Documentation for developers is available on the docs.edx.org web page.

  • edX Developer Documentation collects information directly from edX platform python docstrings. The topics in this guide include guidelines for contributing to Open edX, options for extending the Open edX platform, using the edX public sandboxes, instrumenting analytics, and testing.
  • Installing, Configuring, and Running the edX Platform provides procedures for getting an edX developer stack (Devstack) and production stack (Fullstack) oprerational.
  • XBlock: Open edX courseware components provides preliminary documentation on the XBlock component architecture for building courses.

GitHub

There are two main edX repositories on GitHub.

Additional repositories are used for other projects. Our contributor agreement, contributor guidelines and coding conventions, and other resources are available in these repositories.

Email and IRC

To receive and share information by email, developers can join these Google groups to ask questions and participate in discussions with peers and edX staffers.

  • For conversations about the code in Open edX, join edx-code.
  • For conversations about running Open edX, join openedx-ops.
  • For conversations about globalization and translation, join openedx-translation.

Additional Google groups are occasionally formed for individual projects.

Note

Please do not report security issues in public. If you have a concern, please email security@edx.org.

EdX engineers often monitor the Freenode #edx-code IRC channel.

Wikis and Web Sites

The code.edx.org web site is an entry point for new contributors.

The edX Engineering team maintains the Open Source Home wiki, which provides insights into the plans, projects, and questions that the edX Open Source team is working on with the community.

The pull request dashboard is a visualization of the count and age of the pull requests (PRs) assigned to teams at edX. Click the bars in this chart to get more information about the PRs.

Resources for Students

In a Course

All edX courses have a discussion forum where you can ask questions and interact with other students and with the course team: click Discussion. Many courses also offer a wiki for additional resources and materials: click Wiki.

Other resources may also be available, such as a course-specific facebook page or twitter feed or opportunites for Google hangouts. Be sure to check the Course Info page for your course as well as the Discussion and Wiki pages.

From time to time, the course team may send email messages to all students. While you can opt out of these messages, doing so means that you may miss important or time-sensitive information. To change your preferences for course email, click edX or edX edge at the top of any page. On your dashboard of current courses, locate the course and then click Email Settings.

From edX

To help you get started with the edX learning experience, edX offers a course (of course!). You can find the edX Demo course on the edX web site. EdX also maintains a list of frequently asked questions and answers.

If you still have questions or suggestions, you can get help from the edX support team: click Contact at the bottom of any edX web page or send an email message to info@edx.org.

For opportunities to meet others who are interested in edX courses, check the edX Global Community meetup group.