Overview

Abstract

We would like to help simplify the an educator’s experience by making it easier to community course updates with students. Today, you can use the Course Updates feature to post an update in Course Home, but you cannot schedule these updates. You must also copy the contents of this post to the Bulk Email tool to broadcast this message, and optionally create a post in the Discussion forums to echo this.

Context & Background

• The Course Updates feature was recently converted to use new front end technology, but previous to this change Updates had remained relatively unchanged since their initial implementation in Studio circa 2013.

• Course Updates were intended as a primary in-platform mechanism for educators to reach out to students for instructor paced courses. Updates were never reimagined to work for self paced courses, and are thus less used today than they were from 2012-2015. Incorporating self-paced learning triggers for new updates is one way to reimagine how updates could be used in courses.

• When the Course Home was updated to be powered by the learning MFE in 2019 we decided to only show the most recent update, a short term compromise as we focused on releasing the MFE to production. How updates are rendered in course home, including whether or not students have actually read previous updates, is an improvement we can address now.

• Generating in-platform updates is not enough to reach learners, but we never automatically sent out course updates via email and instead expect educators to duplicate these updates via the bulk email tool and discussion forums.

Scope & Approach

• To start we split out communication needs and patterns for Instructor Paced Courses + Self Paced Courses as two branches that should both be addressed. Secondly, we consider that updates / course communication plays a role both in-platform and off-platform. Finally, we should recognize that other features are similar + connected to the updates feature and we should consider these as well. (Weekly Highlights, Course Reminder Emails).

• Pacing

  • With Instructor Paced Courses, sections (and optionally subsections) can be set to release over time. Course Updates could be tied to the release of a new section in this case.

  • With Self-Paced Courses, course updates could be tied to completion or engagement with a new section.

• Existing Updates / Communication Functionality

  • Weekly Highlight Emails - Results in weekly highlight emails if enabled for each section / week.

  • Section Highlights - Optional learning objective details that make the weekly highlight emails more effective (based on experiments done when feature was added.

  • Course Reminder Emails - Course home feature that replaced the course goal feature that sends out weekly reminder emails based on your goal.

  • Personalized Learner Schedule - Results in emails for weeks 1-3 in a course (if enabled)

  • Course Bulk Emails - Manually sent on demand by educators

  • Discussion Updates - Posts can be created on demand by instructional team.

• Section Association

  • For many of the existing updates / communications related features, there is an explicit or implicit connection to the Section of a given course. With the goal of helping educators configure courses upfront that can be more predictably and efficiently run, we are considering having course updates that are explicitly tied to Section visibility, engagement, or release.

  • While authoring sections, you would be able to specify the following:

    • Learning Objectives / Section Highlights- If drafted, these would be included in the Course Update for that Section / Week. Eventually these could be auto-generated or suggested based on content in the section, but that may not be in this initiative.

    • Section Update: If drafted this would be included as an update to be shown in Course Home, to be shown embedded on the first unit page of the Section (unless already viewed / dismissed from Course Home).

      • Base Visibility: These updates could be shown as locked / not available until you ‘start’ Section Name A or Section Name B, whichever section is linked to the update.

      • Course Home: Ideally we could track visibility of these updates on course home to mark these as read / unread.

      • Embedded Updates: Could be shown at the top of the first page of a new section, and marked as read if that is how you access the content. An update viewed this way wouldn’t be triggered again from the Course Home page, but we could keep a collapsed update reference at the top of the unit page starting each section to still make it visible in context.

  • Weekly Goal Reminder Emails: We should review this feature to determine whether it should co-exist with the “Weekly Highlight Emails” and “Personalized Learning Schedule” emails.

    • Tying the email delivery timeframe to a specific schedule may make sense for self-paced courses, but this should be revisited for duplication concerns and signal to noise ratio concerns as part of this effort.

  • Subsection association - We could consider also letting updates be linked to a specific subsection, allowing for educators to link special messaging to a subsection / assignment that might be important for learners to know.

  • Broadcast & Visibility of Updates

    • When Updates are created and linked to a section, their visibility rules can be tied to starting a week / section or other similar rules. When a learner is not active for the start of a new week or personalized course schedule, echoing the course update via email should help get learners to return to the course without requiring that educators copy paste their update into an email via the Bulk Email tool.

    • Similarly, we can consider a new discussion post type called “Update” which echoes the course update (broadcast via email) and shared in platform (course home + embedded at front of section). This option would let updates get student engagement / comments, and this post type could be configured to allow for public student comments or private comments only, depending on course need.

  • Non-Section Updates

    • Not all updates may be tied to a specific section or subsection, some may just be open broadcast messages. These should also be able to be linked to a time / date or potentially some sort of completion milestone in the course.

  • Completion Update

    • If we explore the possibility of updates being triggered / tied to completion or grade level milestones we could trigger a completion email for the course, and even show an update in Course Home / etc based on this. A special “completion update” could exist by default with the ability to have the text from this update be overwritten.

Value & Impact

• Streamlined communication tools to support lower cost course authoring and higher quality touchpoints with students

• Clean-up over communications in-platform and off-platform in the critical first 3 weeks of a course to improve signal to noise ratio for course outreach.

• Interoperability between updates, discussions, and emails to improve the experience of course instructor + student communication opportunities.

Concept Sketches

Coming Soon

Milestones and / or Epics

Initiative 1: TBD

Goal: …

• …

Screens:

Initiative 2: TBD

Named Release

This is TBD based on community interest and funding.

Timeline

TBD

Proposed By

@Marco Morales , and team @ Schema Education

Appendix

Existing Functionality

Open

Course highlight emails enabled (but can’t be disabled), and Section highlights are included in these emails as well. Both are examples of per-Section learning content that could be used in course updates.

Open

A feature (enabled on edX.org, but not sure what it takes to enable) that lets learners set a weekly learning ‘goal’ which results in reminder emails