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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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Milestone 1a: Teams Infrastructure Modernization
Milestone 1b: Support for LTI Apps within Teams
Milestone 1c: Teams Discussion Updates
Milestone 1d: In-Context Teams Sidebar
Milestone1d1e: Exemplar Teams Apps & Extensions (Big Blue Button / Zoom)
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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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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 Milestone 2a: Off-Platform Invitations Into Teams
Milestone 2b: Language & Location Teams
Milestone 2c: Discussions: Introduction Post-Type
Milestone 2d: Intro Post - Teams 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
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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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