Summary

This document specifically describes the current architecture of Teams, including the data model, features, and permissions. 

The source code for teams primarily lives in the edx-platform repository in GitHub. For more details, see the feature landing page: /wiki/spaces/LEARNER/pages/19006021.

Model

• ENABLE_TEAMS setting in edx-platform

• Requires Discussions capability (coupled to Discussions permissions, and requires a linked Discussion topic)

• Topics (API: /api/team/v0/topics)

• have an ID, name, description

• belong to a course

• stored in course structure (mongo)

• Teams (API: /api/team/v0/teams)

• have members

• have instructor-defined limits for capacity (set once, globally, at a top level)

• have user-defined name, description, language, and geography settings

• have system-managed ID, date created, and last activity metadata

• belong to a course

• optionally belong to a team topic (but if they don’t, they aren’t discoverable)

• have an associated discussion topic (auto-generated at team creation time with GUID)

• stored in RDBMS (mysql)

• Members (API: /api/team/v0/team_membership)

• belong to a team (limit one team per learner)

• have system-managed date joined and last activity metadata

• stored in RDBMS (mysql)

Discovery

• Teams are grouped into topics for search purposes

• The Teams tab automatically appears if the course team sets a non-empty dictionary in Studio's advanced settings

• Teams have activity, which right now is just related discussion forum posts (but is extensible based on Django signals)

• Thread and comment activity automatically updates team metadata

• Learners can search for teams (but only within a selected topic, there’s no top-level search except via API)

Rules

• Learners can view any team’s forum posts, but can only add posts to those linked to their teams

• Learners can join or leave a team at any time, provided they’re enrolled in the course

• Learners can create teams

• The LMS does not let learners modify these settings after team creation (except staff)

• Staff here means: admin, discussion moderator, discussion admin, community TA
  

• Learner is automatically added to a team they create

• Learners can only be part of one team at a time, except for course staff

• Instructors can create topics in Studio via Advanced Settings

• Course staff can delete teams and remove members from teams