View the GitHub ticket for proposal status updates
Overview
This document explains the need and specifications for a feature that we are calling Course Optimizer. This feature would point out where broken links and images within a given course are. This would minimize what we store on our servers, save course teams time, and provide a better learning experience.
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Instead of scanning the entire course, the recheck functionality scans only the blocks identified during the previous scan. However, implementing this feature has been deemed too complex for the initial release of Course Optimizer. For more details, refer to the original planning document.
Links
Original planning doc is found here:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GE1hIzcx8unAk8cRT3eE7_FmoMz2jplX5ySBcXCE2fs/edit?tab=t.0 NEW Based on the helpful comments, I have added three possibilities as future enhancements:
Automatically Run & Warn Authors: extend this check to run in the background once for your course and give you a heads up via email or course outline page message. When / how to do this might be tricky to define since course publishing workflows vary greatly. As an example, perhaps only run if it wasn’t run manually and if there are published unit pages in your course with the start date N weeks away? This could help catch issues before a course goes live.
In-Context Checks for Text + Problem Blocks: how much cost / effort it might be to run this course optimizer for just a singular block. If it was quick to run the optimizer just in time after draft publish or draft save of any text / video components, you could show a unit page or block level message warning for any detected broken links soon after authoring.
Find a way to enable authors to fix the link from the checker: rather than taking them away to the block - Axim have some related designs mocked up for the “sync feature” for library content in courses (see story 11). There’s a modal that lets the authors scroll through a list of components that have updates available, and accept/deny the changes from within the same modal. I can see something similar here, with an option to edit the links directly in the modal.
Additional Information
Competitive research (Canvas)
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2U will drive and fund the delivery and ownership/maintainership
Questions:
The original idea was that we could add to it over time, with other aspects of this feature potentially including videos/images that are not used in the course, duplicate content, etc. However, for this first version perhaps Course Optimizer is not the best title. Link Verifier could be an option. I am open to suggestions.