Open edX - Course-Level Assessment Configuration Improvements

The following potential improvements have come up as a result of this research (not necessarily tied directly to this area of configuration):

• Optional assignment types/grouping

  • Currently, Open edX enforces assignment types, as it lacks a way to define what is and isn’t graded content outside of graded subsections. This is non-standard to the LMS space and introduces a large level of complexity for course authors and administrators configuring and designing courses.

  • The functionality to group and weight assignment types is standard, requiring them as the default way to configure grading is not.

• More droppable content flexibility

  • Though droppable content is a concept that is present in most academic-focused LMSes, its support in Open edX in comparison to other LMSes could be improved.

• Mandatory graded content

  • Without excessive planning and care, Open edX courses can be passed without completing vital content such as final exams. It should not be so complicated to require that certain content be completed in order to pass a course.

• Site and organisation-level defaults for settings

  • Open edX is designed around the existence of different organisations on the same platform, which is an edX.org-specific use case, but one that can be leveraged to provide granular control over settings at multiple levels.

  • We do not have any UI-based facility for default configuration at either of these levels currently.

• Reintroduce grade scales

  • We used to support other types of grading other than pass/fail, and with the new learner progress MFE, we no longer do. 

  • The current interface does not provide a good user experience whatsoever, but the fact that multiple elements of the grading setup that can be configured in Studio no longer exist in the learner frontend is an issue.

  • If we stick with flat pass/fail grades, we need to ensure that that’s all that is necessary in other Core use-cases. Pass/Fail is fine for MOOCs, but more complex environments may have more complex requirements.

• Simplified/automatic grading setup

  • Currently, Open edX’s top-down style of grading setup is more complex than most other LMSes despite having fundamentally less grading-oriented functionality. In less complex courses with basic configuration, it should be as simple as creating some graded content and marking that the content matters for the final grade.

• Integrate progress with grading

  • Completion and grading are two entirely separate measures of course completion that are not well-integrated. It is not possible to assign a grade based on completion of non-submitted content such as videos, and as such there’s no way (out of the box) to award certificates based on completion, as certificates are awarded via grading. The two systems need a much more symbiotic relationship.

Overall, Open edX has a very non-standard high-level grading configuration model. The grading doesn’t match that of other LMSes, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing if we were to provide a pedagogically sound alternative opinionated grading structure, what we instead provide is a bad user experience with vestigial features that no longer function, with partially-implemented “advanced” functionality. 

Open edX’s grading configuration is simultaneously more and less flexible than most other platforms. The grading model is completely alien to most other platforms, which is probably why it’s so difficult for new users to grasp, even from an education technology background. This impacts the platform’s ability to exist in a diverse multi-platform environment, which is also the only way Open edX can exist at an academic institution that already has a more management-heavy LMS.

More work is needed to ensure that our overall grading model is fit for purpose.