Documentation Overview and Products
- Sylvia Pearce (Deactivated)
- Feanil Patel
- Deb Chatigny (Deactivated)
Introduction
Our documentation is based roughly on audience, with one or more products that correspond to each one. For example, for our course authors audience, we have the Building and Running an edX Course guide.
Because capacity has been limited, ownership and maintenance of some of these products has been transferred to other teams.
Documentation Product Owners
The following table lists each current documentation product, its audience, and its owner. The table also includes links to information pages about each product.
For information about how to update documentation in Read the Docs, see Creating and Updating Documentation - RTD.
For information about how to update documentation in Zendesk Guide, see Creating and Updating Documentation - Zendesk Guide.
| Product | Audience | Purpose and Comments | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|
| UI text and messaging | Course teams, learners | Provide guidance at the point of use that uses the same terminology as the documentation, and has no spelling or grammatical errors. | Documentation |
| UI text and messaging | All other audiences (edX internal, developers) | Team that builds the feature | |
| Building and Running an edX Course | Course teams (partners) | Guide both new and experienced course team members through the process of building and running a course, and inform course teams about available features. Documentation audiences that rely on this guide are:
| Documentation |
| EdX Learner's Guide | Learners on edx.org | Provide help for learners who have questions about topics including how to navigate through a course, how to complete course materials, and how to receive certificates. The EdX Learner's Guide isn't as well-known as the Building and Running guide. Until October 2016, the only way for learners to find the guide was through Google searches or references to the guide in the course. Many course teams didn't know about the guide. With the addition of context-sensitive help in the LMS, views of the EdX Learner's Guide jumped over 4500% in a week. Additionally, there is some overlap between the FAQs that the student support team maintains and the learner's guide. Derek Hixon (Deactivated), Alyssa Boehm (Deactivated), and Deb Chatigny (Deactivated) have begun meeting to discuss the best way to serve learners. | Documentation/Support (TBD) |
| Various | Business customers | The new Business team will require different kinds of docs than we've created before. For more information, see Enterprise Docs To Do. | Documentation |
| Building and Running an Open edX Course | Course teams (OE) | Guide both new and experienced course team members through the process of building and running a course, and inform course teams about available features. This guide is nearly identical to the partner B&R guide, but has a few differences. Some features available on edx.org are not available on Open edX, and vice versa. Note that as of November 2016, any partner course author information that also pertains to the Open edX course authors guide will be included in the Open edX guide, but any information that pertains exclusively to the Open edX course authors guide will not be included by default. | Open Source |
| Open edX Learner's Guide | Learners on OE installations | Provide help for learners who have questions about topics including how to navigate through a course, how to complete course materials, and how to receive certificates. This guide is nearly identical to the partner learner guide, but has a few differences. Some features available on edx.org are not available on Open edX, and vice versa. Note that as of November 2016, any partner learner information that also pertains to the Open edX Learner's Guide will be included in the Open edX guide, but any information that pertains exclusively to the Open edX Learner's Guide will not be included by default. | Open Source |
| Installing, Configuring, and Running the Open edX Platform | Open edX system administrators | Provide information for system administrators who want to run an instance of Open edX and allow course teams to create courses. Feedback from the Open edX community has indicated that this guide has significant information gaps. The documentation team has not had the resources to create and maintain this guide satisfactorily. | Open Source |
| Release notes and portal announcement | Course teams (partners and OE), system administrators, developers | Provide regular (usually weekly) information to partner institutions and the Open edX community, including course teams, system administrators, and developers, about the latest updates to the platform. Feedback from course teams and from the Open edX community indicates that the release notes do a good job of letting course authors know about changes that will affect them, but do not always include important changes that affect system administrators and developers. | Product |
| Product update | Course teams (partners and OE), system administrators, developers | Provide regular (monthly) information to partner institutions and the Open edX community, including course teams, system administrators, and developers, about the latest updates to the platform. | Product |
| EdX Research Guide | Researchers (data czars) | Provide in-depth information to data czars about all of the events and SQL tables in their data packages. Feedback has indicated that this guide has historically proven useful and adequate for researchers. | Analytics |
| Using edX Insights | Course teams | Provide information about the graphs and other visualized data in Insights to course teams. Feedback has indicated that this guide has historically proven useful and adequate for researchers. | Documentation |
| Developers | Provide developers with the information they need to develop applications for edX. Developer documentation includes individual IDA documentation. Feedback from the Open edX community has indicated that Open edX developer documentation has significant information gaps. The documentation team has not had the resources to create and maintain this guide satisfactorily. Additionally, developer information in general is scattered among various wikis, GitHub, and other locations. | Tools | |
| Developers | Provide information for anyone who needs to use an edX API. API documentation includes the following products, among others.
As of November 2016, only a few APIs are public and documented, and the documentation for these APIs is fragile and breaks frequently. EdX does not have a strategy for publishing or documenting APIs. The documentation team has not had the resources to maintain API documentation satisfactorily. | ||
| Open edX XBlock Tutorial | Developers | Provide developers with a step-by-step guide to building an XBlock for Open edX. Feedback from the Open edX community has indicated that this tutorial has significant information gaps. Additionally, Open Craft has its own XBlock tutorial that seems to be more robust and accurate. | |
| edX Open Learning XML Guide | Developers | Provide developers with detailed information about Open Learning XML (OLX), edX's version of XML. This guide has been in an alpha version for over a year and has significant information gaps. |
The Partner and Open edX Portals
Other than for monthly product updates, the documentation team does not work with the partner or Open edX portals. For more information about the partner portal, contact Kate Venier (Deactivated). For more information about the Open edX portal, contact John Mark Walker (Deactivated).