POV - Grouping Beyond Courses: Building with Learning Contexts
In the last few months, there’s been a lot of discussion about grouping — not just grouping courses, but enabling the platform to support more flexible compositions of learning experiences.
To align our thinking, we’ve decided to adopt the term Learning Contexts, a concept introduced by Dave Ormsbee, to refer to any element in Open edX that shares a set of common properties and can be grouped with others.
A Learning Context can be anything from a small component, a sequence, or a diagnostic, up to a full course — or even a collection of courses grouped together into something larger, like a degree (or whatever term an institution prefers to use).
Our view is that all Learning Contexts that can be grouped or published should expose a common set of properties, making them interoperable and composable. Some examples of shared properties could include:
Enrollable – learners can register or access it.
Discoverable – it can appear in listings or catalogs.
Completable – the platform can track completion.
Certifiable – completion can lead to a credential.
Graded – supports assessment data, rich grading policies, and different grading formats (e.g., mastery-based, numeric, letter grades).
Taggable / Metadata-rich – supports taxonomies, tagging, and structured metadata for organization and discovery.
Linked / Connected – supports relationships with other Learning Contexts, including prerequisites, recommendations, or dependencies.
Integrates Learning Tools – can link to learning tools such as discussions, teams, live sessions, etc.
Schedulable / Visible – supports scheduling, release dates, and visibility rules (e.g., available/unavailable, public/private).
Authored – can have one or more authors or educators associated with it for ownership, publishing, and collaboration.
Defining these shared properties would allow any Learning Context to participate in a Group, regardless of its level of granularity. A Group, in turn, could also be treated as a Learning Context itself, enabling recursive composition (for example, a course made of sequences, or a program made of courses, or a degree made of programs).
We agree that starting with courses makes sense as the first Learning Context to implement this model, but the long-term vision is broader: to let authors create and publish different types of Learning Contexts — from micro-content to multi-course structures — all sharing the same foundational schema and behavior.