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2025-07-29 Meeting notes

2025-07-29 Meeting notes

All public Working Group meetings follow the https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/COMM/pages/4324360195

 Date

Jul 29, 2025

 Participants

  • @aamir ayub

  • @Ali Hugo

  • @Asma Ahmed

  • @Cassie Zamparini

  • @Edward Byun

  • @Dave Ormsbee (Axim)

  • @Mahnoor Sarwat

  • @Marco Morales

  • @Sam Daitzman

  • @Santiago Suarez

  • @Sarina Canelake

  • @Ty Hob

  • @Steve Tiszenkel

  • @Tim Krones

  • @Jenna Makowski

 Goals

  •  

 Discussion topics

Time

Item

Presenter

Notes

Time

Item

Presenter

Notes

30 min

Discussing an MVP for Open edX Notifications

@Ali Hugo @aamir ayub

  • Aamir Ayub will give a walk-through of edX notifications—a feature that helps keep learners and instructors up to date on course activity.

  • Would adding this feature to Open edX as-is be a good first step toward building notifications capabilities, or should we consider a different approach?

20 min

Communicating upcoming features with non-technical stakeholders

 

  • Follow-up from an item that arose during our last Product WG Meeting (https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/x/SACFLwE) around the difficulty educators have in keeping up to date with what important features are being worked on and when they’ll be released.

  • Note from Chelsea on this: This may not be right for this community, but I’ve seen success with one quarterly communication going out to non-technical stakeholders on a previous project. The format we used was a slide deck (but this could be a newsletter, email communication, automated communication that pulls from some source we keep up to date - like the product roadmap) that included:

    • One page, easy-to-read at a glance kanban snapshot where the timeframes were Now, Next, Beyond. Each feature had a short non-technical title (where possible) and a product area label (so infrastructure investments and customer experience features (for example) were clearly labeled), so stakeholders could easily visually pick out the features they cared to learn more about and ignore the rest.

    • For each feature mentioned on the NOW portion of the above kanban board: 1-2 bullet points maximum about the end user benefit of each feature mentioned on the board; 1-2 bullet points maximum on exactly what work was being done over the next release cycle; 1 statement (if known) about target release timeline

      • This way, if a stakeholder has thoughts about the item you’re working on, they feel the immediacy of needing to connect with you, provide input, etc on that item.

      • The key here is to keep things as SHORT and end-user focused as possible. We want people to read this and when we write these bullets, we want to think about: Why does this person need to know we’re working on this thing? How will it impact their experience of the platform once it goes live? What problems are we trying to solve today that we can use your input on?).

10 mins

Introducing the Updated Product Review Process

@Cassie Zamparini @Mahnoor Sarwat

Briefly walk through the proposed process for product reviews. We’ll invite async feedback after the meeting.

 Action items

 Decisions

 

Notifications Discussion:

  • The grading category is only for course admins / course operators correct?

    • Correct

  • The notifications tray is in the header so it's a global slot, but as a learner, do I see all the notifications for all of my courses? Or is it scoped to the course I am currently in the outline for?

    • It’s only glboal, learners see notifications for all their courses

  • Just a thought, before I forget, maybe there should be descriptions below each item? Your explanations over video are helpful and more explanatory.

    • Could be a tooltip or similar

  • Are notifications being contributed on mobile?

    • Some UI in native mobile apps will merge upstream

    • Native mobile inbox is powered by the platfrom notifications app

    • Mobile is integrated with platform, ex push notifications settings

  • Do you folks have enough data to say how much of an impact notifications have had on user behavior (engagement, unenrollment to avoid noise, etc.)?

    • Some forum engagement decline, no increase in daily active users, but in a complex platform and hard to attribute a change in trends to a particular feature

  • Has the ability to disable / enable full categories of notifications come up in prior product / user conversations? In other words, all discussions message types / notifications being off or on at once for example.

    • No, but could be discussed in the future

  • Do notifications have different levels of urgency/priority?

    • No

  • Does grouping also wrap similar messages across multiple courses or is grouping only within a course currnetly?

    • Grouping works based on a grouping ID, which is the course ID, and for ORAs it’s the assignment ID. It’s hard-coded.

  • Do grouped notifications in this implementation trigger an intermediate view to allow the user to choose an individual notification, and/or redirect to existing pages that show all recent items (like discussions)?

    • Don’t currently have, it’s just the tray

  • What kinds of notifiations do learners value?

    • [STeve] - Learners value notifications the more urgency they convey. The #1 notification said they would be valuable is the assignment due tomorrow, #2 the assignment due in 3 days.

 

Goal: We need to answer whether the edX notifications implementation will meet the needs as a core product open source implementation.

Must be:

-generalized

-extensible

-use-able out of the box for ~80% of users

Questions for community input:

Product

  1. Are there additional notifications your users want to see in the notifications tray that are not currently included in the notifications/upgrades/grading tabs? What are they? What problems do those notifications solve?

    • Currently, course staff don’t receive notifications for forum activity unless they’re the original author or have manually followed each thread. This creates extra work and increases the chances of missing important conversations.

    • While users have the option to receive daily or weekly email digests, there is no option to receive emails for all new posts. This is a standard feature of most forums, and we believe users would find it useful.

    • The ability to send Open edX project news to Open edX instance users within Studio / the LMS. The idea is to increase the likelihood of users adopting new features, participating in community discussions, attending events etc.

    • The ability to send notifications to instructors or peers.

UX/UI

  1. How extensible is the tab design?

    • If we decided to keep the tab layout, would it be feasible to make it horizontally scrollable—similar to these mockups for notifications on the mobile app?

  2. Has the team considered or looked into using profile pictures or other visuals to differentiate notifications messages for increased engagement / conversion?

    • Is this something that could be added in a later iteration?

  3. Is a notifications tray the best approach for displaying notifications in Studio / the LMS?

    • I think so. We may find that there are a few UX changes we could make to improve the functionality, but this could be done on an iterative basis.

Dev/Operator

  1. How easy is it to add custom notifications?

  2. Are we aligned on architectural direction and overlap for django notifications app + edx-ACE, including the boundaries of what logic / capabilities is kept in which of the two (and the rationale?)