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The Open edX platform offers a fair amount of options to set up your online courses, as individual learning experiences that are aggregated in a course catalog. However, sometimes you may need to arrange courses in a sequence or Program, so that a learner can easily find and take multiple courses and then get a certificate for each course plus some form of certificate for the whole program. This kind of arrangement poses some additional challenges in the platform setup.
The Open edX codebase includes a complimentary service called the course discovery service which is an advanced component that collects and stores metadata about the online courses created in Studio and helps share it efficiently among some of the other Open edX applications. This particular advance feature plays a key role to enable the offering of programs (Collections of courses for the learner to follow) and to the extent this is also connected with the edx ecommerce application, these programs can also be purchased at a discounted price.
It is important to mention that this service is mostly used when the platform is integrated with an external marketing site, as the course discovery service provides an alternative for the marketing site to list the different courses available.
Programs are defined and configured into the course discovery service and learners are then capable of selecting one program for enrollment, which triggers the enrollment on all the courses that belong to that program. These program enrollments don’t issue any certification when the learner completed all the included courses.
In response to this kind of challenge, eduNEXT has developed a simpler way in which programs (collection of courses) can be set up in an open edX platform without the need for the Course discovery service. This solution is based in edunext’s exclusive extensions and it provides two core functions:
- Learner enrollment to programs (collection of courses) from a single operation that triggers the enrollment in multiple courses.
- Issuance of the certification representing the completion of the program when all the required courses have been completed.
This functionality is built on a regular course that is designated as a proxy for the program or collection of courses. In this article, we’ll refer to this special course as the Program-course.
Here’s a detailed explanation of how this approach solves the aforementioned challenges:
- The program-course is created, and configured to have the desired enrollment policy, dates, and course description that represents the collection of courses.
- As part of the configuration of the program-course, one advanced property is set to link this course to all the individual courses that are part of the program.
- Learners can enroll in the program-course as they would with any other course, and this enrollment automatically triggers the enrollment in all the individual courses as well.
- The learner will now see both the program-course and all the individual courses in their dashboard and can start taking each course according to the starting and release dates that each course may have.
- Individual courses also have a special advanced configuration that enables the grades from this course to be transferred to one gradable component in the program-course, so every time a learner completes one individual course and gets the corresponding certificate, they will be advancing their progress in the program-course.
- Ultimately, when the learner has completed enough individual courses, for their grade in the program-course to pass the approval threshold, as configured in the program-course grading policy, they will be able to claim the certification for the program-course.
This useful feature is a recent addition to the eduNEXT cloud PERFORMANCE subscriptions that is currently available for all our active customers. In case of interest in taking advantage of this particular functionality, you can simply reach out to our support team to request the activation at the site level.
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