Teaching and Learning: Improved Authoring Speed

Created by Marco Morales (Deactivated)
Nov 14, 2019
4 min read

TL;DR: As part of a focus on delivering quick wins to the teaching and learning experience, the Teaching and Learning (T&L) squad has worked on improvements to course authoring speed. These changes were explored as a part of a quick discovery process and quick partner feedback process to get input in advance of release. All changes are now live on production in Studio & Studio Edge. Additional details on the collection of changes are described below and in our preview Partner Portal post from September.

Product owner: Marco Morales
Engineering Lead: @David St. Germain (Deactivated)

What is it?

A summary of the changes are included below, but additional details are posted in the Partner Portal post we published September 9th in advance of this work being delivered. We have interwoven the visual references to our changes in between our text descriptions, in classic edX learning sequence style.

  • Component Display Name Editing
    Courses often contain thousands of components, so any time we can save course authors on an individual component we expect that time will add up!

  • Problem Markdown Editor Learnability & Usability
    Problem authoring can be time intensive, especially as problems become more complex through hints, feedback, and explanations. We have updated the icons in the common problem markdown editor so that the name of the problem template is more obvious.

  • Problem Markdown Reference Sheet Visibility
    Another set of changes relates to the markdown reference sheet, which will now be visible by default. As part of this change we have made the component editing modal window larger, ensuring the authoring space was not reduced with the addition of the reference sheet.

  • Jump Navigation Tools in Studio
    We have updated Studio’s Unit authoring pages to better support non-linear authoring navigation patterns. Authors often seek to revisit or review earlier content areas or pages in their course, so we have updated the page title area breadcrumbs to let you quickly jump to other sections or subsections.

  • Learning Sequence Navigation
    We have introduced on Studio unit pages a representation of the learner-facing sequence bar, helping authors more quickly jump to the unit pages before or after the one they are currently authoring. Our goal is to understand whether this reduces the need for authors to keep many tabs open, including many Studio and LMS tabs open, to get a full picture of the sequence of content they are authoring.

  • Course Outline Unit Naming (Suggested via Partner Feedback!)
    We have introduced to the Course Outline view in Studio a way to directly update the name of a Unit to speed up renaming workflows and content adjustments. Authors must still publish that unit page for the name to be live, but once the name edit goes through the Outline is updated to reflect this draft state for the Unit.


Key talking points for customers:

Why work on this area of the platform?
Authoring effectiveness is a common thread of concern for our partners, and the degree to which tools such as Studio have remained static for our core authoring workflows a one common complaint from course authors. This is one of the reasons we identified quick win projects targeted on highly visible changes within the core authoring workflow. There is more we can do but we hope these high visibility authoring changes spark new feedback about how other ways to better support authoring speed and quality updates in the rest of FY20 or beyond.

Who will notice the change, and where?
All Studio and Edge Studio authors will see these changes on Unit Pages (and the Course Outline page for the unit naming change).

What impact will it have on course development teams?
We hope to streamline navigation workflows that have in the past resulted in course teams maintaining many tabs open at once, or frequently jumping into the LMS to “see what it really looks like.” In addition we hope authors are more aware of the learning sequence aspects of the learner experience, helping steer authors toward interwoven learning sequences at the recommended level of breadth and depth. We plan to use our Studio eventing and other data tools to analyze various authoring measures to quantify the impact in the coming weeks.

Results
We have received positive feedback so far on the changes both during the discovery process as well as feedback after the release of the features! As noted above we plan to use quantitative measures in the coming weeks that we will share once the data is available.

Credits / A Group Effort!

Thanks to the T&L Squad for all their efforts on this front!
T&L: @David St. Germain (Deactivated) , @Dave Ormsbee , @Ned Batchelder (Deactivated) , @Scott Dunn (Deactivated) , @Nina Huntemann (Deactivated) , @Jennifer A. Akana .

Thanks additionally to everyone else who gave feedback and supported this project, especially in the early design discovery process. (@Ben Piscopo (Deactivated), @Shelby Quinn (Deactivated), various untagged course authors and partner representatives who provided feedback spanning MIT, Indiana U, Harvard, HEC Montréal, etc)