Tracking when students view videos or read PDF files uploaded to LMS

[Alejandro Lengua Vega]

Hello,
I have a concern about if OPENEDX can track when students do read or view videos that are requisites.
Is this possible when video content is hosted in VIMEO (to name an external source)?

BTW, Is it possible/recommended to host those content in the LMS itself?

[Nate Aune]

It's not recommended to serve video content out of Open edX, as it's not performant for serving up large files. You can use Vimeo to deliver your video content, but the tracking information about whether the student viewed it or not is not sent to Open edX's tracking logs. But you should be able to get these kinds of analytics on the Vimeo side, although it will probably be anonymized and not show you which students viewed which videos. 

Wistia (an alternative to Vimeo) does provide this kind of tracking. https://wistia.com/product/audience-page
Wistia in general, has excellent analytics for video content including heatmaps and engagement graphs: https://wistia.com/product/analytics

You can use both Vimeo and Wistia (and also Brightcove) video content with Open edX using our Video XBlock, which was designed to have feature parity with the built-in Open edX video component, including an interactive transcript, video download and multilingual subtitle support, while also providing secure delivery of the video content. https://appsembler.com/blog/deliver-videos-securely-open-edx-courses-new-video-xblock/