Introducing the New DemoX Course (Quince)

Introducing the New DemoX Course (Quince)#

In 2013, just as the Open edX® platform was starting to take off, the “edX Demonstration Course”, or DemoX, was created and bundled with each new Open edX® installation. To many, this is a familiar thumbnail on a fresh new installation of Open edX®:

In the 10 years since the original DemoX, the Open edX® platform and the online education landscape overall have evolved significantly.

The number of people taking courses online has increased dramatically.
Conservatively, the number of learners reached by MOOCs increased by 73,000% from 2011 to 2021 [source]
The Open edX platform has evolved from a mainly MOOC platform to one that supports blended learning, fully online degrees, micro-credentials, and more.
The tools and approaches used to build courses have evolved and expanded.
The Open edX project has spun out of edX.org and is now supported by a community of largely volunteers.

In short, by 2023, the original DemoX was already long overdue for a re-imagining. A new course needed to inspire the newer generation of Open edX users. It needed to demonstrate practical, reusable examples of what can now be done in an Open edX course. And so DemoX v2 was born:

The new DemoX course is available now. There are five modules that advance from general to specific knowledge and provide reusable blocks that you can repurpose for your own courses.

Module 1: Dive into the Open edX Platform#

A general overview of the purpose and structure of the Open edX® platform.

Module 2: Crafting Captivating Content#

Demos and best practices for crafting fundamental learning content (text, images, video) as well as tools like Libraries, conditionals, and custom styling.

Module 3: Ace the Assessments#

An overview and re-usable practical example for many of the assessment tools offered by the Open edX platform:

Module 5: Your Open edX Community#

A brand new module about how to find support and get involved in the Open edX community.

Using the New DemoX Course#

If you’d like to start using the Open edX DemoX course on your instance, getting started is easy. If you are running a Tutor-based installation version quince.2 or higher, you can run the following commands to import both the course and the demo library:

$ tutor local importdemocourse --version master
$ tutor local do importdemolibraries --version master admin

If you are on a different version, or would prefer to install it manually, then you can follow the instructions in the DemoX github repository to import the library and course .tar.gz files into your instance.

The course content is released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 US License, so you are free to re-use as you like for your own organization as long as you follow the terms of the license. In addition, this course collects feedback for continuous improvement. As you go through the course, you are encouraged to leave quick feedback on any unit you like with the feedback widget at the bottom of each page. Feedback is anonymous and will be secured by Axim Collaborative and periodically reviewed for course improvement.

About John Swope: John Swope is the architect for the new DemoX course, and the founder of Curricu.me who specializes in Open edX® course development and custom games and interactives for the platform. He is extremely grateful for the many contributions from the Open edX® community that made this course possible.

Maintenance chart

Review Date	Working Group Reviewer	Release	Test situation
2025-04-28	Docs WG	Teak	Deprecated: This is no longer the current release

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