Open edX Ulmo Release (December 2025)#

Welcome to the Ulmo release! Discover new and exciting features built for authors, learners, and site operators. Here’s what’s ready for you now:

🧑‍🏫 For Course Authors#

Build Complete Course Structures in Libraries: Build entire course sections once, then reuse them across courses, with improved sync workflows that visually show changes before you apply them - plus a migration tool to move Legacy Library content forward.

Reusable LTI Configurations: Set up LTI tool credentials once in a central store, then reuse them across all courses and blocks, eliminating repetitive data entry and reducing configuration errors across your entire instance.

LTI Certified ✅: The Open edX Ulmo Release has achieved the LTI Advantage Complete certification!

Smaller changes include a new problem visibility option and new tools to limit spam in discussion forums.

🎓 For Learners#

Beautiful Course Pages: Your course catalog is getting a major glow-up! New, customizable pages help you showcase courses with modern design and full theming support.

Smart Notifications: Never let students miss important discussions again! Keep learners engaged with timely alerts about new posts and announcements, delivered both in-platform and via email.

Enhanced mobile experience: Learners get a new Course Home carousel showing progress, videos, assignments, and grades at a glance. Also included is a redesigned Content tab with filtered views and a dedicated Progress page to track achievement.

⚙️ For Site Operators#

Important: The Ulmo release will require the new theming system.

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 Verawood (June 2026)#

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

Roles and Permissions Improvements in Studio: A more granular, nuanced way of granting privileges to course staff and instructors.

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

Instructor Dashboad Overhaul: A beautiful, themeable Instructor Dashboard with numerous usability improvements is coming your way.

Reliable, Repeatable LTI Units: Configuration integrity when duplicating LTI blocks and improved compatibility with Content Libraries, enabling reliable block-level reusability and reducing the need for repeated configuration across courses.

AI Extension Framework: By leveraging existing backend and frontend plugins, the Open edX platform will support adding diverse AI tools to the platform (both LMS and Studio) as extensions.

⌚ Ready to Upgrade?#

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