Public Course Content Access Pilot (T&L / Open edX)

Created by Marco Morales (Deactivated)
Last updated: Apr 24, 2020
3 min read

TL;DR:
We wanted to share with everyone a platform update that allows courses to optionally enable their audit track content to be publicly available on the web. This feature is in limited pilot testing as we learn more about its impact and ensure platform edge cases are considered. Today we have enabled this feature on three courses: edX’s DemoX Course, edX 101X Course , and HarvardX’s Mechanical Ventilation for COVID-19.

We hope these changes will ensure learners increasingly discover edX content as they search for specific learning content on the web.  In this way many learners may then discover edX and continue on to enroll in the full course experience.

The pilot announcement can be reviewed in today’s Partner Portal Post.

Product owner: Marco Morales
Engineering Lead: @Dave Ormsbee

What is it?
Once fully rolled out, course teams would be able to choose from two new options in addition to the currently supported “Private” option. The private option requires enrollment prior to enabling access to any learning content, as is the case currently for all edX.org courses. 

These changes are not yet available in Studio but are shown here as a way to describe the new capability being introduced. 

  • Private Content: The private option requires enrollment prior to providing access to any learning content, as is the case currently for all edX.org courses. 

  • Outline Preview Only In this mode, the course outline on the course home page is public to the web, serving as a preview of the course content structure. Course content views are not made public in this configuration.

  • Public Content Access: In this mode, course content views are public and indexable on the web. Your course home page will also show the course outline and course structure as well. Certain content remains private, including timed and proctored exams, cohorted content, enrollment track content, conditional content, subsections gated by prerequisite requirements, as well as any content included in content experiments.

Key talking points for customers:

Why work on this area of the platform?
It should be highlighted that this (rather complicated behind the scenes) feature was contributed to the Open edX Platform by external contributors (Cloudera+ OpenCraft), with edX support, review, and stewardship from @Dave Ormsbee since the original feature proposal over 2 years ago.

We have discussed the potential benefits of an open content discovery process for years at edX, but development of this feature in a way that respects the many different content visibility restriction tools we have today is complicated enough that we never prioritized this effort internally. One benefit of the Open edX ecosystem is that other sites can have different priorities, all while advancing the same core platform!

We hope this feature will enable a “long tail” or learner discovery that will lead over time to more enrollments for edX and improved visibility of our content offerings on the web.

Who will notice the change, and where?
Over time, learners searching on search engines for specific terms or references that match existing edX course content with the public content mode enabled will see these direct results to edX content pages.

How can course teams use this feature?
This feature is being piloted, and we have provided in the Partner Portal post a way to express interest in joining the pilot: https://forms.gle/KYotz2wLKuco3N1z6.

Results
For now this is in limited pilot testing while we identify additional SEO improvements, track pilot course enrollments, and conduct more internal review of opportunities this capability makes possible.

Credits / A Group Effort!

As noted before, a special thanks here to @Dave Ormsbee who has worked closely with OpenCraft / Cloudera on helping this original proposal and contribution work for our platform in all its intricate content configurations.

In addition thanks to others at edX (T&L, Engineering, Partner Support, Partner Enablement) who have supported this pilot feature planning in various ways leading up to this point.