Where scaffold runs
How scaffold embeds inside the LMS your institution already uses, and how a page you author ends up in front of your students.
Scaffold is the editor. It lives inside the LMS your institution already runs. Your IT team installs the connector once; you author inside the LMS you already use; your students access the work the same way they access everything else from your course.
What’s installed where
The editor itself runs inside the LMS’s authoring surface. From your perspective, that means:
- In Open edX, scaffold is available as an xblock you add to a Studio unit.
- In Moodle, scaffold is available as a native activity module you add from the activity chooser.
- Support for Canvas, D2L Brightspace, Blackboard, and other LTI 1.3 platforms is in development. It cannot currently be installed.
You don’t log in to scaffold separately. The LMS handles authentication.
How a page reaches your students
Once you’ve authored a course page in scaffold, the LMS treats it like any other graded activity. Your students find it in the same place they find their other coursework: the course module, the gradebook, the weekly schedule view.
When a student submits their work, the Scaffold adapter stores their assessment and activity state inside the LMS. It publishes the official score through the LMS’s grading mechanism, so you see it where you’d see any other assessment grade.
State, grades, and learning records
Scaffold uses three separate host-owned paths:
- Learner state preserves answers, attempts, checklist progress, and flashcard progress.
- Official grades flow through the LMS grading mechanism.
- Optional xAPI learning records describe supported learner experiences and interactions in the LMS event pipeline.
Scaffold does not run a separate gradebook, student-record service, or
Learning Record Store. Moodle owns accepted records as Moodle events;
Open edX publishes them as the scaffold.xapi tracking event. See
Learning records and xAPI for the
supported blocks and data boundary.
What IT needs to do
The first time your institution uses scaffold, the IT team installs the connector. After that, you can keep adding course pages without their help.
Start with Install scaffold for current package availability and the right platform guide.
If your institution hasn’t installed it yet, the hosted playground lets you try the editor without anything installed. The playground saves your work in this browser, but it does not sync to your LMS or other devices. Use it for trying Scaffold, not for coursework you need to keep.
What’s next
- Your first page walks through authoring a multiple-choice question end to end.
- The editor covers every way to add and edit blocks.