2023-06-27 Meeting notes

 Date

Jun 27, 2023

Recording

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PaW7FTXOe9o3Ir08VItJy_80UOyCGngb/view?usp=sharing

 Participants

  • @Brian Mesick

 Discussion topics

Time

Item

Presenter

Notes

Time

Item

Presenter

Notes

5 min

Funded contribution updates

@Brian Mesick

  • Redis bus: Last ADR is accepted, probably 1 more PR before wrapping up

  • Aspects (OARS) BI: Initial dbt models are and high level table structure are coming in. Hoping to have basic instructor dashboard and reports in by the end of the contract in 2 wks.

15 mins

Aspects Updates

@Brian Mesick

  • OARS is now Aspects! Most things are renamed, except the ADRs

  • Beta is coming within weeks, testers wante

  • dbt is integrated and configurable

  • Vector based tracking log pipeline from Cairn is in

  • Vector based xAPI pipeline is in

  • Ralph upgraded to 3.8.0 with performance improvements

  • Talking to people from campus.gov.il and wgu.edu about their data use cases.

15 mins

Aspects Extensibility

@Cristhian Garcia

Cristhian is going to update us on various extension points!

  • Two dashboards in Aspects now: Open edX Admin Dashboard and the Instructor Dashboard (Rory the DBA has been focusing on this one).

  • #69 added ability to maintain custom dashboards/charts etc assets for Superset, which can also be shared with the community.
    People can create them using the Superset UI, export them to a zip file, and then use the script tool created by this PR to generate a tutor patch for their custom assets.

  • #70 added dbt to Aspects, so people write their own performant, complex queries.

  • #99 adds ability to run database migrations on clickhouse, so we can maintain changes between versions, and users can add their own tables, fields, etc.

15 mins

Aspects in LMS update

@Cristhian Garcia

Cristhian is also going to update us on some very early work he did to get Superset data and charts to display in the LMS via XBlock Asides, and share what he’s learned.
https://github.com/eduNEXT/aspects-superset-aside

Caveats:

  • XBlock Asides are old, and not well-supported by newer things, like REST APIs.

  • We need to be mindful of performance – cannot be hitting Superset every time we load a block.

  • Asides are not supported in Studio, so we’d have to use the LMS for this visualisation.

 Action items

@Brian Mesick write skeleton documentation so we can begin fleshing things out. We will need to update the “getting started” docs, but also want high level architecture and data flow / pipeline docs. (From last meeting. Update: still needs to be done, maybe I’ll have a start by Weds)
@Brian Mesick look into Caliper recertification. edX handled this in the past, it seems to require some kind of formal relationship with 1EdTech, I’ll ask around Axim to see if anyone knows (From last meetings. Update: Axim has an account, when we have a beta candidate for Aspects I’ll update the demo server with it and use it to re-certify or generate a list of issues)

 Decisions