Problem: Authors don't have enough options to create the content they would like
Overview
In the context of the collaborative project with Spanish universities, we have identified that non-technical authors face a limitation in creating content to improve the learning experience because they do not have enough options or the ones that exist are very complex. In this post, we will present the problem and propose concrete solutions that would benefit the entire community.
If you have other use cases related to this problem or other solutions, do not hesitate to share them.
Problem
Open edX course authors face several limitations when creating engaging and effective content:
They can't easily embed videos from other platforms, such as Vimeo.
Creating iframes for custom content is difficult for those without technical skills.
The lack of an interface to add jumps to other sections of the course makes it difficult to navigate and organize the content.
Key Use Cases
To better understand the issue, here are some examples of common situations where course authors are affected:
As an instructor I want to enrich my course with videos hosted on Vimeo or other services to improve the quality of the content.
As an author I want to embed a custom survey form using an iframe, but I have not been able to generate it correctly.
As an author, I want to create a smoother flow of content by adding internal links that allow students to easily jump between related sections of the course, but I haven't figured out how to achieve this.
Solution
Solution 1: We propose the creation and integration of the following plugins in the Tinymce text editor:
Embed Video Plugin: This plugin will allow course authors to easily embed videos from external platforms. ( Because the React video player project has been taken up, we are discarding this improvement and will wait for its completion.)