Catalog Browsing UI

The UI of the default Open edX LMS front page of courses (generated by edx-platform) is limited. It was created back when we had four courses on edx.org, and it doesn’t work well for browsing a large catalog.

For various historical reasons, students who go to www.edx.org see a Drupal site that is proprietary to edX. Over time, we’ve been steadily pushing more of the course discovery logic into open source components, and the current course browsing experience uses the course-discovery service. The UI shell at https://www.edx.org/course?course=all is still being served in Drupal, but the browser is making API calls to course-discovery to get all the information.

Have other folks created alternate front ends to talk to this service, either as a live querying JavaScript app or a static site generated via a tool like Hugo? If not, are folks looking into it?

Thank you.

Thanks @dave,

1. This is something that we in Campus-IL also need and plan on doing. I’m not aware of anyone that is doing this, but I’d be happy to find out. In order to show interest in this feature, you can upvote this post which describe the same issue:
   Filtered course search

2. The “what do we have” category is for posts that describe tools that you already have and wanna share with the community. If you think that the post linked to in 1 does not describe what you need, can you plz move your post to “what do we need” category?

Thanks and welcome to edXchange!

CC @antoviaque @juliegoff @pdpinch

Ah, thank you for pointing that out. I’ll upvote the thread you linked.

It’s possible that we could actually appropriate some of the front end code already written for edx.org. The approach taken there (static front end + JS powered API) was explicitly chosen to try to make it easier to eventually lift out of our Drupal app and into something open. I don’t know how easy it would be to take out edx.org specific things though, or if there are any other issues – I merely float it as a possibility. My understanding is that it uses Backbone, so it might not be the best starting point.

@dave I don’t know exactly how they have implemented it, and I doubt it uses the catalog service, but I know that FUN has a custom catalog feature on their site, which allow a richer browsing experience, categorization, etc:

https://www.fun-mooc.fr/cours/

I’ll ask them if someone can come to give more details about how they did it, and if they would be interested in contributing to having such a feature upstream.