Copy-Paste: Building New Open edX® Capabilities

The Client

Axim Collaborative is a social enterprise dedicated to expanding access to education and amplifying its impact for millions of learners. A joint venture by Harvard and MIT, it is the non-profit successor to edX, the online learning platform launched by the universities in 2012. edX was created to increase access to high-quality learning, advance digital learning technologies, and enhance teaching both on campus and online. Today, Axim Collaborative stewards the Open edX® project, working to make learning more accessible, relevant, and effective for all. Axim focuses on understanding what works best for learners and the institutions that serve them, continually improving Open edX for both educators and students.

The Challenge

Educational content creators using the Open edX® platform emphasized the need for a feature to reuse content across multiple courses, saving curriculum developers considerable time when building courses. Additionally, the ability to reuse problems in different assessments would not only reduce authoring time but also enable teachers to gather data on problem effectiveness across various contexts.

Addressing this challenge required a partner with expertise in both full product design and high-quality coding. Axim sought a team experienced in solving complex problems and delivering solutions that are simple, user-friendly, and seamlessly integrated into the platform. To meet these needs, Axim partnered with OpenCraft to design and develop the solution, collaborating closely with the broader Open edX® community to ensure its success.

Project Vision

After identifying the need, a cross-organizational product team—including Axim, edX, and OpenCraft—collaborated to define the product vision. The project engaged stakeholders across the ecosystem, aligning on a solution to address critical gaps in Open edX® functionality:

Reusability of all course hierarchy levels (component, unit, subsection, and section) across Open edX® courses
Lightweight functionality for authors to share and reuse components, units, subsections, and sections directly between courses
Creation of an entirely new feature—Studio Clipboard—for Open edX, eventually enabling authors to copy any level of the course hierarchy and paste it into another course

Our Approach

The project was truly a team effort, led by Axim Collaborative with active participation from the wider Open edX® community. Our team contributed our expertise in user experience, user interface design, and software development.

Ali Hugo, Product Manager at OpenCraft, explained that our goal was to support Axim's initiative by making it easier for course creators to copy and paste components and units within Studio. We began by wireframing the simplest user flow for copying and pasting a component on the unit page. Once the UX for this functionality was reviewed and approved by the wider team, we began development, while our design team moved on to wireframe the next step in the course hierarchy—copying and pasting units.

We took an iterative approach, relying on user feedback early on to ensure the project stayed on the right path. Open communication with Axim’s leadership and collaboration with a diverse group of stakeholders throughout the process were crucial to the project's success.

Our tasks for the project included:

Creating wireframes to outline the user experience (UX)
Transforming wireframes into UI designs that matched Studio's current styling
Building high-fidelity prototypes for usability testing
Supporting usability tests, which Axim conducted with power users
Refining designs based on usability test feedback
Translating finalized designs into code

Throughout the project, we worked collaboratively to refine the plan. In addition to designing the UX, we implemented solutions that included:

Developing a new "clipboard" functionality to store learning components when copied
Integrating clipboard, copy, and paste functionalities into the Studio interface
Expanding these capabilities to cover additional content levels, such as units
Leveraging BroadcastChannels to keep the user's clipboard synchronized across all browser tabs

Each capability was designed to be as intuitive as possible, maximizing ease of use and minimizing the need for training. For detailed information regarding the project’s technical approach, look here.

The Solution

Users can copy and paste components on the unit page by first selecting the three-dot menu next to the component they wish to copy, and then selecting the "Copy to Clipboard" option from the menu.

Once copied, users can paste the component onto any unit page by selecting the “Paste Component” button at the bottom of the page. They can also view the contents of their clipboard by hovering over the “What’s in my clipboard?” link, which appears just below the “Paste Component” button.

Users can copy and paste Units directly from the Course Outline. To do this, they simply select "Copy to Clipboard" from the three-dot menu next to the Unit they want to copy, then click the "Paste Unit" button at the bottom of the subsection.

Alternatively, users can copy a Unit directly from the Unit page by selecting the “Copy Unit” button in the sidebar, then choosing “Paste as New Unit” from the horizontal navigation at the top of the page.

Results

The benefits of this project for the Open edX® community are far-reaching. To ensure the highest standard of excellence, we partnered with Axim Collaborative and engaged a diverse group of stakeholders from across the vibrant Open edX® ecosystem. Together, we’ve delivered a solution to a critical gap in the platform’s functionality. Course authors can now more easily reuse content at various levels of a course in the simplest, most intuitive way. This work also lays the groundwork for future functionality that will help users manage and share content seamlessly. All new features are fully compatible with the current Open edX® platform, ensuring that existing users can adopt these innovations without disruption.

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