Proposed Enhancements - Teams v2 Experience Improvements and Extensions

Owned by Marco Morales
Last updated: Dec 07, 2023 by Andy Pethan
9 min read

 

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.

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

Any relevant background information about the Initiative. What key pieces of information are important for newcomers to understand about the nature of the problem or pain point, the current user experience, etc. Please use the following format:

Milestone 1: [Title]

  • [1-2 sentence abstract. Include key user stories if appropriate]

  • [Impact metric]

  • [Link to Epic where it may exist in GH, jira, etc]

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.

Milestone 1a: Teams Front-End Infrastructure Modernization

  • Understand and implement the changes necessary to move the Teams Django App in edx-platform out to its own MFE built to current standards in Paragon, rebuilding and supporting existing functionality with modern platform practices, all as we reduce the size of the edx-platform Core! This also makes it possible for Teams to include the modern Discussion MFE instead of the current legacy version.

  • Metrics: Future development speed & core reduction

Milestone 1b: Support for LTI Apps within Teams

  • Updates to the Teams API to facilitate the ability to plug in other applications, including the latest version of the edX Discussion application. Future examples include live audio and video chat, social networking app integrations, collaborative document apps, diagram/sketching apps, and other tools that support live and async remote collaboration. As part of this, explore different tiers of controls that allow or disable groups of apps (such as allowing instructors to remove the entire category of live video tools from a large MOOC, or a team manager locking in a limited set of apps that the team can focus around control over team apps / tools linked in to a given team). Should consider how LTI might facilitate many more integrations as well as part of this effort.

  • Metrics: Platform extensibility (including breadth and depth of partner commitment to build upon it) & Team engagement / usage (professor adoption/approach and student buy-in/usage).

Milestone 1c: Teams Discussion Updates

  • Support new Discussions MFE in teams. The new MFE is a purely infrastructural improvement to be able to abandon the older code-base and invest new changes in the active code. This sets up work for next milestone (improvements to discussions for teams) in a way that avoids updating or maintaining the legacy Discussions app.

  • Metrics: Teams app is running the new Discussions app and legacy code is no longer depended upon.

Milestone 1d: Teams Discussion Updates

  • Streamline the UI for team discussions to encourage more frequent usage. The discussion-board structure of post-reply-comment can be bloated for a team and is likely to reduce spontaneous conversation. A visual reformatting with a similar back-end structure, “channel”-”message”-”thread”, could give teams a Slack-like UI for conversations that are still organized, yet easier to display from a team home view and embed in a future sidebar. Channel names could be prefixed with “teamshortname-” to simplify views that integrated chat from multiple teams of the same student. All teams can default to have a “teamshortname-general” channel to make it easy for new teams to begin using discussions without requiring a user to manually create the first “space” for discussion. These improvements are made in the Discussions MFE and could later be utilized via that app directly, not just via Discussions when integrated inside of Teams.

  • Metrics: Student engagement with teams and team discussions

Milestone 1e: In-Context Teams Sidebar

  • This effort involves bringing team conversation as an optionally pervasive secondary sidebar in the learning MFE. Whether for team assignments, or more open conversation, teams could have ongoing conversations alongside a course. Team discussion updates (above) would make it easier to flip between multiple channels of conversation in the sidebar and engage in quick posts.

  • Metrics: Course student engagement (learner session duration, time in course, learner outcomes)

Milestone 1f: Exemplar Teams Apps & Extensions (Big Blue Button / Zoom)

  • Initial exemplar application extensions to the LTI Apps milestone above, this would allow teams to join on demand video calls, schedule future team conversations, or whatever other potential tools are possible for Zoom / BBB. The Zoom work could extend from the existing LTI Pro integration. Both video apps would have a primary UI component within the teams view, but we have an opportunity to integrate teams apps into the in-context course view via the Teams sidebar (above).

  • Metrics: Student course engagement

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

Milestone 2a: Off-Platform Invitations Into Teams

  • This allows users to invite off-platform friends via a link to join an edX course and be auto-joined to a specific team. Within the homepage of a team, any member of that team can generate an invite link to send to friends via other communication platforms. When opened, the user is led through the sign-up process, auto-added to the course, and then auto-added to the team. This way, new users can begin with instant community (of their real friends).

  • Metrics: proportion of invited users, retention of invited users

Milestone 2b: Language & Location Teams

  • This action would allow all learners to automatically be placed into teams based around preferred language or global location (based on user settings). To ensure appropriately-sized teams, team formation could happen near the course start date, and then new students could be automatically added to the relevant teams. This gets all users initiated in their first team(s) so they can default to having community.

  • Metrics: usage of teams, course engagement

Milestone 2c: Discussions: Introduction Post-Type

  • A feature-enriched type of discussion post that makes it easier for professors to add an introduction experience to courses and easier for students to connect with peers. The post gets pinned to the top of the discussion posts, each student gets exactly one response (and the professor can visualize who has/has not replied), and anyone can comment on the student replies to say a short welcome. Professors can embed the intro post within the context of the course as a block so students know that it exists and is graded (participation).

  • Student retention rates (early in the course and throughout)

Milestone 2d: Intro Post - Teams Integration

  • When viewing each student reply in an introduction post, the viewing student can also see a list of the posting student's teams. The list allows the viewer to request to join any of the open/semi-private groups. This way, students who share mutual interests can find each other’s teams in the course and connect with each other, via teams, for future communication.

  • Student retention rates (early in the course and throughout), use of teams chat in courses with/without intros and this integration

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

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.

 

This is TBD based on community interest and funding.

Timeline

 

Recognizing that many Initiatives evolve incrementally, please include a brief scope of the Initiative timeline. Please include a target Named Release, with contingencies if necessary.

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