Course Creation

Overview

Course Creation covers the tools instructional designers and content authors use to build and publish individual courses — the course outline editor, unit editing interface, course settings, and the OLX-based content format. Studio is Open edX's course authoring environment and one of its most significant differentiators from competing LMS platforms.

The modern Studio experience is delivered by frontend-app-authoring (a React MFE), which has been progressively replacing the Django-rendered Studio since approximately 2022.

Split from v1.0. This file was created in v1.1 by splitting Course & Pathway Creation (archived). Pathway-specific authoring is now covered in Pathway Creation.

Current State (2026)

• Course outline: frontend-app-authoring MFE provides the course outline with drag-and-drop section/subsection/unit organization
• Unit editor: The unit editing page in frontend-app-authoring replaces the legacy Studio unit editor
• Settings: Course dates, grading policy, and advanced settings migrating to MFE; some still in Django-rendered Studio
• OLX format: All course content stored as Open Learning XML (OLX) — XML + HTML + assets in a tarball
• Import/Export: Courses exportable as .tar.gz OLX archives; importable between Open edX instances
• XBlock content: All in-course content blocks — text, video, problems — are authored as XBlocks in the unit editor

Architecture

• Frontend: frontend-app-authoring communicates with Studio (CMS) backend APIs in edx-platform
• Backend: Studio (cms/ in edx-platform) is a Django application with its own database; shares MongoDB with LMS for course structure
• Content storage: Course structure stored in MongoDB; assets stored in GridFS or S3
• Publishing: Authoring changes published from Studio to LMS via a publish signal; not real-time
• OLX: The canonical on-disk format; import/export uses tarball extraction/compression

Relevant Repositories

Repository	Role in This Feature	Activity Level	Notes
openedx/frontend-app-authoring	Studio MFE: outline, units, settings	High	Primary authoring frontend
openedx/openedx-platform	Studio/CMS backend: course structure, OLX, assets	High	cms/ directory
openedx/olxcleaner	OLX validation and error checking tool	Low	Dev/migration tool
openedx/cc2olx	Common Cartridge to OLX converter	Low	Content migration tool
openedx/modular-learning	Experimental modular course structure	Low	Research/prototype

Recent Changes

• frontend-app-authoring progressively replacing Django Studio pages
• Unit editor migration from legacy to MFE

History

Origin

• Year introduced: 2012 (Studio launched alongside the LMS as edX's course creation tool)
• Initial implementation: Django-rendered web application (separate from LMS); authors accessed at studio. subdomain
• Context: Studio was a key innovation — a browser-based course editor for non-technical instructors; replaced earlier command-line or file-based course authoring

Key Milestones

Year	Milestone	Teams / People Involved
2012	Studio (CMS) launched as Django web app	Unknown
2013	Open sourced along with LMS	Unknown
~2022	frontend-app-authoring MFE development begins	Unknown
~2023–2025	Progressive Studio → MFE migration page by page	Unknown

People Who Shaped This Area

• Engineering: Unknown — open question for interview
• Product: Unknown — open question for interview
• Design: Unknown — open question for interview

Open Questions

• [ ] Who designed Studio and what were the original authoring principles?
• [ ] Why was Studio built as a separate Django app rather than integrated into the LMS?
• [ ] What was the original course outline UX and how has it evolved?
• [ ] When did the decision to migrate Studio to an MFE happen and who drove it?
• [ ] What are the biggest usability challenges that instructors report with course creation?
• [ ] How does the OLX format constrain or enable course authoring compared to other platforms?