Overview
This is a proposal to improve the Open edX platforms basic course enrollment views and how these are authored in Studio. This would allow for improved mobile discovery and general improvements to enrollment and discovery, views which have been largely unchanged in the platform since its earliest days.This document was created using the OE Roadmap Submission item template , but it likely will benefit from being represented in the roadmap as a series of smaller efforts to make it easier to provide visibility on whatever fraction of this set of initiatives moves forward.
Abstract
We would like to modernize course enrollment pages and enrollment page authoring on the Open edX platform, as doing so would enable:
mobile friendly enrollment pages with richer categorization (subjects / topic),
the removal of raw HTML authoring for enrollment pages,
future mobile optimization for improved performance of these pages.
Context & Background
The base enrollment page authoring views have changed little on the Open edX Platform since its early days. Authoring in Studio is largely a single HTML editing text block hiding in the Schedule & Details page within Studio.
Most Open edX instances with the budget revamp / change their discovery engine and enrollment pages to something more sophisticated but we can do better, even without the need for a full discovery / catalog service adopted by 80%+ of the community.
We can improve the base template for enrollment pages to support improved performance, mobile discovery, and improve the authoring tools used to generate these pages within Studio.
Recent updates like the course authoring MFE, Paragon, and system level tagonomies / tagging makes improved course enrollment page now possible in a much smaller scoped effort than before.
This work should help unblock expanded mobile access, and eventually improved mobile discovery APIs to support native (and improved webview) mobile discovery, including fully offline discovery for smaller sized catalog instances of the platform.
Scope & Approach
The team at Schema Education has only just started scope and approach discovery review, and we are interested in collaborating with the community on next steps for this project, including potential sequencing & funding paths.
Value & Impact
We hope to dramatically improve the out of the box rendering and mobile friendliness of our enrollment pages for the platform.
We hope to add to the course authoring MFE improved authoring tools for enrollment pages and more structured data for instructors, subjects, topics, and more.
We hope to make it much easier for platform adopters to customize these page fields to help reduce the cost of enrollment page customization and extension.
Milestones and / or Epics
Initiative 1: Course Enrollment Page Authoring
Updated experience for basic platform authoring of course enrollment pages to support improved metadata and the new MFE development patterns of the platform.
This would move the course enrollment page content of the Schedule & Details page to its own Course Enrollment page, built into the course authoring MFE. Additional metadata fields to be added to build richer enrollment pages.
Defined APIs for this work will help unblock future mobile web + native discovery improvements.
Improvements / expansion of the fields used to generate enrollment pages such as: Subject, Topic, Instructor, Pacing, Duration, etc can be extended or added over time. This basis should also support must quicker extension by having core enrollment metadata placed close to courses (or within courses directly?)
I
Some details about metadata for these enrollment pages has been added here from our earlier (linked) mobile discovery project page:
Initiative 2: Updated Course Enrollment Template in edX-platform
Mobile friendly templates for use on desktop, mobile web, and for use in the mobile applications if web view based discovery is enabled.
Initiative 3: Mobile Catalog Discovery Browse Screens
Basic Catalog Browse views on mobile application experience (web / native options)
Support for mobile web views / embeds of the existing + updated course enrollment pages
Support for native mobile app enrollment page (TBD)
Initiative 4: Mobile Catalog Discovery Search Screens
Ability to search the catalog, see recent personal and popular searches as well
Named Release
This is TBD based on community interest.
Timeline
TBD
Proposed By
Marco Morales , and team @ Schema Education