[Proposal] Optional Content Support
See Github ticket. Please provide feedback before Jul 17, 2026.
TL;DR summary
Add platform-level support for optional course content in the LMS, allowing authors to mark content as “optional”, ensuring it is clearly labeled and excluded from required completion.
Overview
Course teams sometimes want to include enrichment, background, or extra-practice materials that learners may find useful but are not required to complete the course. Examples include background primers, deep-dive readings, supplemental videos, and problem sets for “extra practice”.
Today, Open edX does not have a consistent platform-level concept of optional content. As a result, course teams often rely on naming conventions or custom content workarounds to communicate that something is optional.
This proposal introduces structured optional content support across authoring, the learner-facing UI, completion logic, and reporting. Course authors can mark sections, subsections, units, or XBlocks as optional. Optional content is clearly labeled for learners, excluded from required completion calculations, and platform administrators can track completion of optional items.
This would replace ad-hoc authoring conventions like adding “Optional” to titles or using custom banners, and would make optional learning experiences clearer, more consistent, and easier to manage across courses.
Problem
Course authors sometimes need to include learning materials that are useful but not required. Without a core optional-content model, this creates several issues:
Authors use inconsistent workarounds, such as adding “Optional” to titles, inserting custom HTML banners, or relying on course-specific instructions.
Learners may not easily understand which content is required and which content is additional. This can make it harder for them to prioritize their work.
LMS behavior is ambiguous because optional items may still appear in completion metrics or required progress calculations.
Instructors and platform administrators do not have a consistent way to report on optional content engagement.
Use Cases
As a Platform Administrator…
As a platform administrator, I need optional content to behave consistently across courses in order to reduce course-by-course workarounds and support predictable learner experiences.
As a platform administrator, I need optional content to be excluded from required completion calculations in order to ensure completion data accurately reflects required learner progress.
As a platform administrator, I need optional content to be represented consistently in course data in order to support reliable reporting.
As a Course Author or Instructor…
As a course author or instructor, I need to mark sections, subsections, units, or individual XBlocks as optional in order to include supplemental content without making it required.
As a course author or instructor, I need optional content to be clearly labelled in the learner experience in order to avoid needing to provide additional instructions around it manually.
As a course author or instructor, I need optional content to be excluded from required completion in order to ensure learners are not penalized for skipping non-required course material.
As a course author or instructor, I need to track learner engagement with optional content in order to understand whether supplemental materials are useful.
As a Learner…
As a learner, I need to clearly see which content is optional in order to prioritize required coursework.
As a learner, I need optional content to be visually distinguishable from required content in the course outline, course sidebar navigation, and unit view in order to avoid confusion.
As a learner, I need optional content not to affect my required completion status in order to confidently choose whether or not to complete it.
Proposed solution
Add a platform-level optional content attribute to the LMS and Studio authoring experience.
Authoring experience
Course authors should be able to mark the following as optional:
Sections
Subsections
Units
Individual XBlocks, such as videos, text for content authors etc.
Below are screenshots of how authors can set optional content for sections, subsections, units and XBlocks:
Setting a Section as optional: Actions (kebab menu icon) > Configure > Completion
Setting a Subsection as Optional: Actions (kebab menu icon) > Configure > Completion
Setting a Unit as Optional: Actions (kebab menu icon) > Configure > Completion
Setting an XBlock as optional: Edit > Settings
When a parent item is marked as optional, the learner-facing UI should make this clear for both the parent item and its children where appropriate.
The optional state should be stored in the course structure, for example as an optional: true/false attribute on the relevant course node.
Learner experience
Optional content should be clearly labelled in the learner experience.
In the course outline, optional items should display an outlined OPTIONAL pill alongside the item name:
In the sidebar navigation, optional items should also display an outlined OPTIONAL pill alongside the item name. If an entire subsection is optional, the subsection header and its children should display the OPTIONAL pill for clarity:
If an entire unit is optional, a banner should appear at the top of the unit page to indicate that the content in the unit is optional:
If only a specific XBlock is optional within an otherwise required unit, an OPTIONAL pill should appear in the block header:
Completion and reporting behavior
Optional items:
Should be excluded from required completion calculations.
Should be trackable in terms of engagement by platform administrators. Harvard Medical School uses the OpenCraft completion aggregator to track optional content engagement down to the individual XBlock level, separately from required completion metrics.
The native Open edX completion mechanism can also display optional completion, but only at the unit level, individual optional XBlocks within an otherwise required unit won't be tracked separately.
Should be trackable in terms of engagement by instructors and learners:
Alternatives we considered
Using the Excluded completion mode for XBlocks to exclude content from being counted toward required completion at the XBlock level. However, this approach has the following limitations:
Backward incompatibility: Whether an XBlock counts toward completion is currently a setting built into the XBlock type itself (e.g. the Video XBlock, the Problem XBlock), not something that can be configured for one specific instance of that XBlock in a course. Making this instance-specific would be a structural, platform-wide change that could affect other tools and third-party XBlocks built around the current behavior.
No analytics visibility: XBlocks using Excluded mode do not publish completion data at all, preventing platform administrators and instructors from tracking learner engagement with optional content, which is a capability needed for understanding whether supplemental materials are effective.
Long-term ownership and maintenance plans
We anticipate that several teams will need this functionality, and core contributors from OpenCraft will be actively involved in its development. These contributors will continue to assist with maintenance. If needed, one or more point persons can be designated as the primary contact for this code after its release.
Open Questions for Discussion
When all children of a unit are optional but the unit flag is not set, should a unit‑level banner be automatically shown, or require explicit author choice?
Do we want a course‑level setting to hide sidebar labels for fully optional appendices to minimize noise?
Contacts
Product: @Cassie Zamparini
Technical: @Piotr Surowiec
Harvard Medical School: @YeaRim Oh
Comments
I guess the other obvious thing is that if we did it this way, the decision for “optional” or not would be done only at the subsection level, and we could not have mixes in the hierarchy. But I honestly think that’s one of its strongest selling points. How would we properly convey to the student that “This is an optional Section but it has a required subsection in it, but that required subsection has two Units that are optional, but one of those Units has a required problem?” It’s kind of a ridiculous use case, but the data model would allow for it, and we’d have to deal with the complexity on the code side of things. I think it’s a much easier thing to restrict it to be handled at the subsection level so we don’t have to try to handle or communicate a bunch of mixed states.
@Dave Ormsbee (Axim),
I’m concerned that we will have to deal with nonsensical combinations in terms of data handling, e.g. an “Optional” Final Exam that’s worth 50% of the student grade.
I suppose it may already be possible to do weird combinations, like introducing a final exam worth 50% that’s released after the course end date. Things like this are usually handled by course authoring teams, not by the platform, as it’s not possible to eliminate all edge cases.
Nevertheless, I think we’re mixing the concepts here - this proposal is only related to the completion (powered by the BlockCompletion model), not to the grading. Unifying these two concepts into a single mechanism might greatly simplify the platform, but it would be a huge project. As long as they are separate, I believe we should not make their contexts/configs overlap. Otherwise, it can quickly become problematic from both the complexity and performance perspectives.
“can I have a mandatory unit in an optional subsection?”
“This is an optional Section but it has a required subsection in it, but that required subsection has two Units that are optional, but one of those Units has a required problem?” It’s kind of a ridiculous use case, but the data model would allow for it, and we’d have to deal with the complexity on the code side of things.
The current logic already enforces that any XBlock with an optional parent is always optional - precisely to avoid such odd combinations.
@Jenna Makowski, regarding some of the most straightforward examples:
An optional unit. Each subsection ends with a short summary that learners can skip - it should not impact their engagement (completion) progress.
An optional unit. The final subsection ends with a quick survey. In some cases, it makes no sense to create a completely new subsection only for this.
An optional individual XBlock. Some units have a quick reminder at the bottom. With the current class-based completion mode (described in the “Alternatives we considered” paragraph), there is no way to exclude it from the completion. As a workaround, we have developed a custom HTML XBlock, but it has some limitations. E.g.:
Querying the course for HTML XBlocks requires multiple selectors to account for different XBlocks types.
There is no way to check how many learners actually read these things. Of course, we could use a regular HTML XBlock with some workarounds, such as reducing COMPLETION_BY_VIEWING_DELAY_MS, but it is less reliable.
I had a similar thought as @Dave Ormsbee , in wondering whether the complexity of adding “optional” to all levels of the course hierarchy is really needed as the use case. Would it be simpler to keep it limited to grade-able elements of the course, ie subsections, and then the option instructors have is to choose from graded, ungraded or optional?
Tagging the Unicon team here to see how this proposal resonates with any of the CBE use cases they’ve come across. I suspect there is some overlap here, where “optional” in the CBE case actually means “already demonstrated mastery”.
@Mary Gwozdz @Tammie Helmick @Jason Richter @Kathryn Green
I think there are at least two CBE-related use cases for the optional flag.
The first is optional content or grade items that a learner can review for additional support or practice, but that do not count toward a grade, completion requirement, or mastery determination. In this case, the item is supplemental. It may still be valuable for learner engagement and support, but it should be excluded from required completion calculations and clearly distinguished from required work.
The second use case is where an item becomes optional because the learner has already demonstrated mastery of the associated competency or sub-competency, as Jenna mentioned. This is especially relevant in CBE because learners may not need to complete every activity in a course if they have already demonstrated the required level of mastery. In this case, the optional status would likely need to be applied dynamically rather than manually. For example, once a learner demonstrates mastery for a specific competency or sub-competency, other activities aligned to that same competency in currently open courses could be marked as optional for that learner. The learner experience would need to clearly explain why the item is optional, such as “You have already demonstrated mastery of this competency,” so it does not look like the course author simply made the item optional for everyone.
One thing to consider is that the optional flag will need to support both course-level optionality and learner-specific optionality. A supplemental reading may be optional for everyone, but a remediation activity or practice assessment may only be optional for learners who have already met mastery.
Making something optional could be based on the alignment of competencies and sub-competencies. If an item is tagged to one or more competencies, the system may need to know whether it is optional because it is supplemental, because mastery has already been achieved, or because it is part of an alternate pathway.
Progress reporting may need to distinguish between “not completed and required,” “not completed and optional,” and “not completed because mastery was already demonstrated.” Those are very different states in a CBE model. Without that distinction, learners, instructors, and admins may misinterpret progress.
There may also be an advising or instructor-facing use case. Instructors may want to see that a learner skipped an item because it was optional due to demonstrated mastery, versus skipping an item that was optional supplemental practice. That distinction could matter when reviewing learner progress or providing support.
This will also impact pacing. In CBE, optional items can help learners move more efficiently through material they have already mastered, while still keeping support materials available for learners who need more practice. That makes optional content part of the personalized learning path, not just a content-labeling feature.
One additional question I would raise is whether optional status is intended to be static or dynamic. The proposal appears to focus mostly on author-marked optional content, which is excluded from required completion calculations and visually labeled for learners. For CBE, the more complex but potentially more valuable use case is dynamic optional labeling based on a learner’s demonstrated mastery status.
I’m concerned that we will have to deal with nonsensical combinations in terms of data handling, e.g. an “Optional” Final Exam that’s worth 50% of the student grade.
Can we leverage Grading’s concept of Assignment Types to get this affect? So when people create a new assignment type in Studio, they’d have a checkbox to say whether it’s optional or not. If it’s optional, the weight is treated at 0% and we don’t care if the number specified matches the number of them in the course. Then we still get the flexibility that people can still label it something (e.g. “Practice Exam” vs. “Review Exercise”) and have that label show up. “Optional” could be added as a label to anything weighted at 0%.
Then we don’t have to worry about conflicts with Progress, and the skip logic for completion becomes simpler. It also means that we don’t have to add a new thing to the serialization format, or worry about parent/child conflicts and what that could mean, e.g. “can I have a mandatory unit in an optional subsection?” Some potential drawbacks:
We couldn’t represent “optional things that don’t count towards completion but do count towards your grade”, which seems like a weird thing to support, but someone might have a use case for…?
The Progress page might have to be modified to skip things that don’t have any gradable things inside of it, if there are pure-reading optional things that would have no score representation.