Open edX 2017: Xblocks and beyond: Extending Open edX

This talk presents our findings about best practices for extending the use of Xblocks to accomplish certain goals in open edX courses while keeping your code clean, and maintainable through open edX releases.

We will go in deep into examples of extensions to the platform that use xblocks to create new course pages, that in turn access more than only the xblock scoped data. For example course grades and certificates information.

Type of questions this answers:
what kind of info can I access in an xblock?
what can I do when the info I want is not in the list?
how to best cross the line in the xblock vs app discussion to access more data?
requirements and consequences of crossing the line
how to keep my codebase modular and extend the platform beyond the course content into the course pages?
how to keep complicated extensions to the LMS through xblocks sane and easy to port to newer named releases?

Felipe Montoya
May 25, 2017
4.1.D03

[sytzebuz]

Hey Felipe, thank you for your valuable insights!

[eugenekuzmenko]

- All kinds of services ... Cohorts...
Cohorts? No they not. There is no service for cohort. I saw your Staff Graded XBlock and you just straight up importing Cohorts model from EDX. If there is a service for cohorts, then which is it? I haven't found any