Open edX Verawood Release (July 2026)

Welcome to the Verawood release! This release puts powerful new tools in your hands while making everyday tasks simpler. Here’s what’s ready for you now:

🧑‍🏫 For Course Authors

Streamlined Team Management, Starting with Studio: Assign Course Admin or Course Staff roles to multiple users across organizations, courses, and libraries in a single action — with a unified console for auditing who has access to what and automatic migration of existing role assignments.

AI-Powered Question Generation, Built to Extend: Generate and review AI-drafted multiple-choice questions right in Studio, saved to a content library for reuse across courses. Since the framework is open for extension, your developers can build custom AI workflows that work directly in author- or learner-facing platform areas.

A Smarter, Contextual Sidebar in Studio: View content details, add new content or pull in existing library components, apply taxonomy tags, and access analytics — all from one resizable sidebar that updates instantly as you navigate your course outline or unit pages.

Libraries, Better Integrated Everywhere in Studio: Search and insert library content directly from the sidebar, spot library-sourced elements at a glance, publish confidently with contributor visibility across affected courses, and review full version history with a side-by-side visualization of changes made to your courses.

A Modernized Instructor Dashboard: Find what you need faster with sortable, searchable tables, streamlined page actions, and tabbed content grouping — plus clearer tool names like Course Team, Enrollments, and Grading that keep related actions together.

Tag Content and Manage Taxonomies Without Leaving Studio: Apply tags at any course level and view applied tags at a glance in the new sidebar, and edit taxonomies directly in-platform — no more exporting and re-importing CSV files.

Reuse and Simplify LTI Setup: Duplicate fully configured LTI blocks across any course on your site and set up new integrations faster with a simplified, tabbed interface that only shows the settings you need.

Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) Certified ✅: The Open edX Verawood Release has achieved the LTI Advantage Complete certification!

Require Agreement Acceptance Before Uploads: Configure custom agreements that authors must accept before accessing file or video upload pages in Studio, with automatic re-prompting whenever an agreement is updated.

🎓 For Learners

An AI Assistant That Knows the Lesson: Learners can chat with an AI assistant right inside a course unit — asking questions, clarifying concepts, and getting answers grounded in that unit’s content, without ever leaving the page. Fully configurable with your choice of OpenAI, Anthropic, or self-hosted models.

Smarter Notifications for Learners and Authors: Learners get open response assessment (ORA) reminders, digest emails that reduce noise, and the ability to opt out of their own post notifications — while course authors now have visibility into course activity right in Studio.

⚙️ For Site Operators

Faster Builds and Reduced Page Load Time with frontend-base: This new frontend architecture paradigm is now available for site operators to test. We encourage operators to enable frontend-base on staging or sandbox instances and provide feedback on the Open edX forums.

More Flexibility To Build Custom Features: More plugin slots have been added across the platform to support easier customization and extension by your development or operations team.

🔮 Upcoming in Willow (December 2026)

We’re working hard on even more improvements in our Willow release! You can look forward to:

Modular Pathway Support: This initiative aims to create a unified and flexible way for course teams, instructional designers, and administrators to sequence, bundle and deliver learning pathways, including microcredentials, small courses, and more. For Willow, the Open edX platform will support stackable pathways for programs.

Competency Frameworks: Competency-based education (CBE) is a flexible and efficient model of learning that focuses on skills mastery over seat time. Designed around skills-aligned assessment, it can more accurately and incrementally direct learners to job opportunities. The Willow release marks a huge first step into native CBE support in the Open edX platform: attaching competencies with assessment criteria to courses and tracking learner progress through their attained skills.

Roles and Permissions Improvements in Studio: New Studio roles are planned to separate authoring responsibilities from the day-to-day responsibilities of managing an active course, and to introduce a read-only role for reviewing course content in Studio.

Your Open edX Instance As An LTI Provider: Work to enable Open edX Studio and Libraries to function as an LTI Provider with an intuitive course author/admin UI is targeted for the Willow release.

⌚ Ready to Upgrade?

Have your site operations team check out the Tutor upgrading guide so they can upgrade your Open edX instance to the Verawood release!

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