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titlePROPOSAL / DRAFT

Contributing Team

Marco Morales , Andy Pethan

Earlier Discovery

Teams v2 Blended Project Proposal

Linked Initiatives

N/A

Overview

This is a meta collection of proposed initiatives to transform and level up the Teams experience on Open edX to better support social, group, and project learning. Each initiative will have its own detailed product requirements page eventually.

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  • 2017 MVP The original version of Teams was an MVP meant to support a McGillX course called GROOCx: Social Learning for Social Impact on edX. You can see the topic categories for teams in the previous screenshot as the original course that was launched with the teams feature. This original version only let you be in 1 team , and while (this was fixed / improved to support multiple teams in ~2021).

  • Usage: The teams applications was not broadly used at edX (or anywhere else to my knowledge). It may have grown in usage with recent authoring updates, the ability to be in more than 1 team, and the ORA team assignments feature but that would require community input to understand.

  • Tech Summary: The Teams experience was built as a separate Django App inside of edx-platform, pre-dating our MFE efforts. The experience was built with a v1 API, but a lot has changed in platform best practices since this was originally built.

  • Original Vision: While originally the vision was to support a wider range of learning application integrations in Teams, the MVP only supported embedded team specific discussion topic area into a Teams detail page. Similarly, the ability to use teams to invite friends to learn with you was cut from the 2017 MVP, and the goal of showing team conversations in context with course content was also too early to realize at the time.

  • Configuration: Additionally, until the Pages & Resources view was added in Olive, teams configuration was a JSON content block in Advanced Settings 🤢. Even with configuration updates, instructors must first configure team topics before Teams is visible to students. Once topics exist students can create teams with a title, description, and optional affinities for language and location.

  • Team Topic Discovery: Students can search / sort the teams within a topic area of interest once topics are configured. They can already create their own teams if none of the existing teams have availability or fit a student’s group learning goal.

  • Comparison to Cohorts: Teams was imagined as a way to support smaller group engagement, something students could initiate or teachers could encourage passively or for specific assignments. Cohorts by contrast are a course wide grouping mechanism that keeps student visibility separated. Students have no choice (generallywithin the edX platform) in their cohort assignments.

  • ORA Team Assignments: Finally, Team assignments v1 was built in 2021-2022 which allows for private teams managed by instructors (instead of the student driven team formation used for topic based teams). ORA assignments can be set up to accept full team submissions through this feature. Additional improvements and configuration improvements could help this feature in the future.

  • Platform Comparison: Some learning platforms focus on their ability to support group projects as a differentiator (ex: NovoED). Open edX has the ability to extend itself with this Teams v2 effort to support rich and complex group formation, and connect these groups to content, discussions, or other tools. Similarly, many years ago McKinsey Academy built custom multi-stage project assignments into their custom Open edX instance. This Teams v2 effort could help bring team and group engagements via Open edX platform into focus.

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titleShow Milestone Details

Milestone 1a: Teams Infrastructure Modernization

  • Understand the changes necessary to move the Teams Django App in edx-platform out to its own MFE, rebuilding and supporting existing functionality with modern platform practices, all as we reduce the size of the edx-platform Core!

  • Metrics: Development speed & Core reduction

Milestone 1b: Support for LTI Apps within Teams

  • Updates to the Teams API to facilitate the ability to plug in other team applications beyond just discussion. Examples include live audio and video chat, collaborative document apps, diagram/sketching apps, and other tools that support live and async remote collaboration. As part of this, explore how to provide instructor course level and student team level different tiers of controls that allow or disable groups of apps (such as allowing instructors to remove the entire category of live video tools from a large MOOC, or a team manager locking in a limited set of apps that the team can focus around control over team apps / tools linked in to a given team). Should consider how LTI might facilitate many more integrations as well as part of this effort.

  • Metrics: Platform extensibility (including breadth and depth of partner commitment to build upon it) & Team engagement / usage (professor adoption/approach and student buy-in/usage).

Milestone 1c: Teams Discussion Updates

  • Support new Discussions MFE in teams and streamline the UI for team discussions to encourage more frequent usage. The new MFE is a purely infrastructural improvement to be able to abandon the older code-base and invest new changes in the active code. The UI change addresses how the hierarchy of post-reply-comment is a bit bloated for a team and likely to reduce spontaneous conversation. A visual reformatting with the same back-end structure, “channel”-”message”-”thread”, could give teams a Slack-like UI for conversations that are still organized, yet easier to display from a team home view and embed in a future sidebar. Channel names could be prefixed with “teamshortname-” to simplify views that integrated chat from multiple teams of the same student. All teams can default to have a “teamshortname-general” channel to make it easy for new teams to begin using discussions. After the MFE integration, the rest of this milestone requires no changes to the data model.

  • Metrics: Student engagement with teams and team discussions

Milestone 1d: In-Context Teams Sidebar

  • This effort involves bringing team conversation as an optionally pervasive secondary sidebar in the learning MFE. Whether for team assignments, or more open conversation, teams could have ongoing conversations alongside a course, with a quick way to reference the content page they are viewing in conversation. Team discussion updates (above) would make it easier to flip between multiple channels of conversation in the sidebar and engage in quick posts.

  • Metrics: Course student engagement (learner session duration, time in course, learner outcomes)

Milestone

1d

1e: Exemplar Teams Apps & Extensions (Big Blue Button / Zoom)

  • Initial exemplar application extensions to the LTI Apps milestone above, this would allow teams to join on demand video calls, schedule future team conversations, or whatever other potential tools are possible for Zoom / BBB. The Zoom work could extend from the existing LTI Pro integration. Both video apps would have a primary UI component within the teams view, but we have an opportunity to configure something that could work for both integrate teams apps into the in-context course sidebar and the main teams app experience with input from the BBB teamview via the Teams sidebar (above).

  • Metrics: Student course engagement

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  • Early engagement of new students is critical to driving retention and connection in a course, so we believe the introductions / first session social experience a student has in a course could be critical central to driving meaningful retention increases across digital courses.

  • This effort spans potential improvements in both the Discussions + Teams app, driving introductions improvements and options across both experiences, we have written up a separate document for this milestone and related sub-milestones, listed below.

  • This initiative benefits from the infrastructure modernization proposals in Initiative 1, but isn’t strict dependent upon it, and partial implementations may make sense to pursue immediately to get user feedback with low investment.

  • Metrics: Retention, Engagement, Social connections to course

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titleMilestone Details

B1 - Language & Location Teams - Easy options for team formation based on location or language affinity, creating social connections within the course early on.

  • B2 - Discussions Stream Post Type - Flattened conversation stream similar to Slack / Mattermost as a post type in the Discussions MFE to be used as a Team discussion option: Posts vs Stream

  • B3 - Support New Discussions MFE in Teams - Improved interface for Teams app discussions

    • B4+ - Others coming soon, draft in progress

    Milestone 2a: Off-Platform Invitations Into Teams

    • This allows users to invite off-platform friends via a link to join an edX course and be auto-joined to a specific team. Within the homepage of a team, any member of that team can generate an invite link to send to friends via other communication platforms. When opened, the user is led through the sign-up process, auto-added to the course, and then auto-added to the team. This way, new users can begin with instant community (of their real friends).

    • Metrics: proportion of invited users, retention of invited users

    Milestone 2b: Language & Location Teams

    • This action would allow all cohort users to automatically be placed into teams based around preferred language or global location (based on user settings). To ensure appropriately-sized teams, team formation could happen near the course start date, and then new students could be automatically added to the relevant teams. This gets all users initiated in their first team(s) so they can default to having community.

    • Metrics: usage of teams, course engagement

    Milestone 2c: Discussions: Introduction Post-Type

    • A feature-enriched type of discussion post that makes it easier for professors to add an introduction experience to courses and easier for students to connect with peers. The post gets pinned to the top of the discussion posts, each student gets exactly one reply (and the professor can visualize who has/has not replied), and anyone can comment on the student replies to say a short welcome. Professors can embed the intro post within the context of the course as a block so students know that it exists and is graded (participation).

    • Student retention rates (early in the course and throughout)

    Milestone 2d: Intro Post - Teams Integration

    • When viewing each student reply in an introduction post, the viewing student can also see a list of the posting student's teams. The list allows the viewer to request to join any of the open/semi-private groups. This way, students who share mutual interests can find each other’s teams in the course and connect with each other, via teams, for future communication.

    • Student retention rates (early in the course and throughout), use of teams chat in courses with/without intros and this integration

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    Initiative 3 Personal Learning Teams / Course Invite Workflow

    • Support for learners to invite their friends to learn with them in a course would help increase social learning among existing connections, increasing retention and engagement. Here, students could invite groups of students together and form a private social team / group in the teams experience. This builds on some of the items in the modernization and milestone B introduction areas above.

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    Initiative 4 Platform Level Teams + Discussions

    • This initiative is meant to explore the value of augmenting the Teams + Discussions applications (given their interdependence) to function as platform level applications to support community discussions at the platform / site level.

    • Metrics: Platform learner retention

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    Initiatives 5+ - Others coming soon, draft in progress

    Named Release

    Expand
    titleTemplate Detail

    First Named Release to include this initiative. Alphabetical named releases are generally cut in early April and early October. Based on the removal date, what named release would be the first without this code? Please reach out to the Build Test Release working group (#wg-build-test-release in Slack) if you're not sure. Use the letter, if you're not sure of the name.

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