Please include:

Overview: 1-2 sentences that describe the project
Problem: 1-2 sentences that describe the primary user problem, challenge or barrier
Use cases: As a [course author author/instructor/learner], I need to be able to [do something] because/in order to [achieve a specific outcome].
Discovery approach: What questions would you ask to explore solutions to this problem?

Status	PROPOSAL / READY FOR REVIEW v1
Contributing Team	@Marco Morales , @Sam Daitzman
Earlier Discovery	N/A
Linked Initiatives	[Mobile] Course Goal Content Personalization
Overview	This is a proposal for updating the Course Goal functionality to express the range of learner goals that enrolled students may have to support content view customization. This supports a shift in the learner experience broadly incorporate tools that enable a learner’s course experience to feel personalized and responsive. We know from usage and research that course enrollments are often triggered for a wide range of course goals, and being responsive to these in a way that is pluggable / customizable across instances to support course sizes, delivery format, and pacing mechanisms would go a long way to modernizing our course experience.

Overview

This is a proposal for updating the Course Goal functionality to express the range of learner goals that enrolled students may have to support content view customization. This supports a shift in the learner experience broadly incorporate tools that enable a learner’s course experience to feel personalized and responsive. We know from usage and research that course enrollments are often triggered for a wide range of course goals, and being responsive to these in a way that is pluggable / customizable across instances to support course sizes, delivery format, and pacing mechanisms would go a long way to modernizing our course experience. Using course goal data, other features (nudges, emails, etc) could be further personalized or adjusted to be goal-aware in the future.

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

Early MOOC research identified the varying engagement patterns of learners in open online courses, spanning explorers, optimizers, completers, certificate learners, and other learning goal / outcome categories. This proposal is build around the idea that we should return to capturing (optionally and with more configuration) course goals from enrolled students in order to define alternate course outline presentation options based on these course goals.

We would like to use this course level tool as a way to support mobile experience personalization to match your course content experience, helping drive early course engagement and reducing the sense that course success must only mean full course completion as opposed to successfully meeting your learning goals and enrollment intent.

Context & Background

Many years ago a basic version of course goals was added to course home to help categorize learner behavior, but this data was hard to access for research, and it never modified the course experience to match your expressed learner goal intent.
More recently, the course goal feature was replaced by a learning schedule planning tool for weekly nudge emails and course planning targets.
- We believe the nudge / planning feature is an important tool, but it should be re-evaluated as part of a cleanup of all the various platform emails, nudges, summary emails, etc that we send out today.

Scope & Approach

The team at Schema 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. We have included our early thoughts for community review and input below.

Course Goal Experience (Draft)

As a starting point, the capability is based on a prompt presented early in a person’s experience of a course, defaulting to the first time entry of a course home page, though other entry points are possible through configuration. Here, a learner is asked to select a learning goal and the platform should immediately reward that decision with some initial, even if slight, customization fit to the goal.

Out of the box we plan to set up a few default course goals based on broad usage of the platform, research into common behavior patterns and enrollment needs in online courses. Included below is a summary of a few example goals, though not all may be configured as default options for this feature.

Course Goal List (v1)

We may be able to determine frequency expectation (approximately) using historical data from Open edX instances active when this feature was enabled.)

Goal	Learning Use Case	Example Personalization of Experience

Goal	Learning Use Case	Example Personalization of Experience
Explore	A learner is still shopping / deciding whether the course format is relevant to them, and this early goal will likely get swapped for another goal in this list, or perhaps another course enrollment is a better fit.	We could choose to highlight N number of course videos or learning units to learner who select this goal instead of showing the full course outline to start. Course authors would need the ability to override automatically selected videos as the best “exploration mode” of the course, but you could imagine learners getting a quick sense of the course through 3-5 videos an a learning sequence or two. Learners would ideally see clear visual progress toward their exploration goal, with completion of this goal meaning learners completed all the ‘exploration content’. Once completed learners could be prompted to set the next goal, perhaps goals like “watch all course videos” or “learn something specific.” next.
Learning Something Specific	Here, a learner can be presented with the opportunity to search for specific content and the course outline can be oriented around that specific learning need, and other platform courses can be shared if they are better / similar fits to that specific learning needs.	As noted here, the focus is on helping learners quickly search and find learning content of value to them, with the ability to quickly review all content in a course pertaining to a given query. Learners could select a new topic to learn about specifically, possibly using suggested tags instead of relying on open searches. This personalization relies on search and ideally content tagging for topics in a course.
Complete the Course	Our default historical assumption for course goal, here a learner may see a brief overview of the course’s structure; the course has 12 weeks, 15 homework’s, and 3 exams. They might optionally seek to learn more about the course’s grading policy, or just dive into content but this could be presented as a follow-up choice.	You could imagine improved performance visuals to support or motivate this goal but this is already our default experience assumption today.
Earn a Certificate	The orientation of this would be around time to complete, defining a plan / pace of completion, and calling out the number of assignments and minimum grading threshold needed for earning a certificate. If this path requires an upgrade that would be explained and linked as well.
Complete a Program	While less common, this would be an option for courses conceptually linked to a platform program, and a slightly broader timeline is considered / messaged after this goal selection, and learner’s are told where they can go to see their program progress. Otherwise this is similar to earning a certificate / completing the course.
Not Sure Yet	This is similar to exploration but encourages diving into the content or scrolling to review the course outline. Messaging that they can always change their goal if their needs change should be called out here as well.

Value & Impact

We believe this feature could be an anchor onto which we are able to layer thoughtful student experience responsiveness based on their learning goals, with flexibility to support a wide range of course needs through configuration options.

Downstream of this core goal setting experience, you can imagine follow-up conversations to help support plan making, schedule setting, goal changes, and other mechanics common to the learning journey. Similarly, messaging can be made to be goal-aware, helping elevate personalization in the future if we find this has the impact we expect it can.

The mobile experience being responsive to you in a meaningful way is a key step to helping break open edx mobile applications out of the content listing world into being a supportive learning coach or guide.

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: Course Goal Platform Revisit

More details coming soon here based on early community interest.

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, focused on community input next.

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.