Course Authoring Import Messaging & Validation

TL;DR: Educators using our course import tools would occasionally get blocked from progressing. Aside from no clear steps, the resolution required edX development and partner support team assistance, delaying authoring and publishing timelines for courses. Now that educators can now triage the issues themselves, we have seen no new development bug reports since release.

TL;UseEmoji: 💨💨💨💨 ✨

Engineering Lead: @Awais Jibran (Deactivated)
Product Lead: @Sarina Canelake (Do Not Use) (Deactivated) + Marco Morales 

What is it?
We wanted to provide an update on some improvements we have made to Studio’s course import functionality. While many course teams do not commonly use this tool, educators cannot continue course authoring when it does fail. Previously, course teams would occasionally encounter issues importing a new version of their course through Studio. Existing error messaging made the root cause hard to discern, requiring course teams to reach out to edX for assistance.

Below are two examples of the many new error messages that provide detailed location names and suggestions to educators on how to resolve their import issues.

Open

Key talking points for customers:

Who will notice the change, and where?
Course authors blocked by the import tool might be unable to update or launch their course without edX intervention but now they will see specific error messages in the course import area of Studio. A full list of messages shown to educators is documented in Confluence.

Credits / A Group Effort!

Thanks to the T&L - Pakistan team for driving this fix forward ( @Awais Jibran (Deactivated) , et al) as well as @Sarina Canelake (Do Not Use) (Deactivated) who helped support this project’s scoping and initial setup earlier this year. Thanks also to support from @Emilio Rodriguez (Deactivated) and @Julie Davis (Deactivated) for assessing the impact of the work done!