Proposed Enhancements - Teams v2 Experience Improvements and Extensions
Status | PROPOSAL / DRAFT |
|---|---|
Contributing Team | @Marco Morales , @Andy Pethan |
Earlier Discovery | Teams v2 Blended Project Proposal |
Linked Initiatives | N/A |
Overview | This is a meta collection of proposed initiatives to transform and level up the Teams experience on Open edX to better support social, group, and project learning. Each initiative will have its own detailed product requirements page eventually. |
Overview
This is a meta collection of proposed initiatives to transform and level up the Teams experience on Open edX to better support social, group, and project learning. Each initiative will have its own detailed product requirements page eventually.
- 1 Overview
- 1.1 Abstract
- 1.2 Context & Background
- 1.3 Scope & Approach
- 1.4 Value & Impact
- 1.5 Milestones and / or Epics
- 1.5.1 Initiative 1: Teams Modernization, Apps, and In-Context Use
- 1.5.1.1 Milestone 1a: Teams Front-End Infrastructure Modernization
- 1.5.1.2 Milestone 1b: Support for LTI Apps within Teams
- 1.5.1.3 Milestone 1c: Teams Discussion Updates
- 1.5.1.4 Milestone 1d: Teams Discussion Updates
- 1.5.1.5 Milestone 1e: In-Context Teams Sidebar
- 1.5.1.6 Milestone 1f: Exemplar Teams Apps & Extensions (Big Blue Button / Zoom)
- 1.5.2 Initiative 2 Learner Introductions Experience
- 1.5.3 Initiative 3 Platform Level Teams + Discussions
- 1.5.1 Initiative 1: Teams Modernization, Apps, and In-Context Use
- 1.6 Named Release
- 1.7 Timeline
- 1.8 Proposed By
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
Teams v2 - The following is a collection of initiatives that we hope updates the Teams application in the Open edX Platform to live up to its original promise: supporting small group community and deeper content engagement for learners who would rather not learn alone.
The teams app experience has changed very little from the MVP that was delivered in 2017 (with the exception of ORA team assignments v1 and improved Teams configuration via Pages & Resources in 2022). Many opportunities exist to support group connections in smaller courses as well as help students in larger courses find learners like them to support continued engagement.
Context & Background
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 (this was 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 (within 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.
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 believe we should be able to highlight our small group learning functionality in a year’s time at the next Open edX conference if we can rally the community around a handful of funded projects in this platform area.
Milestones and / or Epics
Initiative 1: Teams Modernization, Apps, and In-Context Use
This initiative is meant to span teams app infrastructure modernization, LTI app support for Teams, a v1 In-Context Teams sidebar alongside content, and other platform cleanup efforts. A full proposal page will be created for this effort soon.
Initiative 2 Learner Introductions Experience
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 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
Initiative 3 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
Initiatives 5+ - Others coming soon, draft in progress
Named Release
This is TBD based on community interest and funding.
Timeline
Our current assumption is that initial discovery and Milestone 1 (Teams Infrastructure) could be a useful initial increment that would give us time to gather community input on future milestones and iterate on initial product + design concept sketches.
Proposed By
@Marco Morales, @Andy Pethan , and team @ Schema Education