Updated CourseGraph Tool

Created by Marco Morales (Deactivated),
Last updated: Nov 17, 2021
3 min read

TL;DR: 

Coursegraph, the tool used internally at edX to help answer questions about our course content, has been updated to keep its catalog data current. CourseGraph stopped updating over a year ago, leaving us without the latest information about course content, but thankfully this is now fixed after various infrastructure updates! Coursegraph lets us understand which features are in use across the very long list of capabilities in our content platform, putting into perspective the impacts of product changes, open bugs, etc.

Release date: 11/15/21

Product owner: @Marco Morales (Deactivated)

What is it? Infrastructure updates to our CourseGraph tool that let us answer important questions about our course content including:

  • Which content blocks & LTI content tools are in use across the catalog?

  • Help me identify which courses are using a soon-to-be deprecated feature so that we can notify these course teams.

  • How many courses use feature X?

  • Which courses across the catalog have upcoming proctored exams scheduled?

  • Many other example questions along with Coursegraph documentation linked here

A small preview of the query interface for CourseGraph, with an in-progress query as an example.
A visual snapshot from our CourseGraph queries example, showing how edx team members can reuse commonly used queries or build their own to answer key content level questions across our catalog.

 

Key talking points for customers:

How would you sell it to customers, partners, or businesses?

This is used internally by product delivery teams, the support team, and others to answer questions about our course content. Coursegraph lets us query metadata within the course content using a graph database management system letting us check metadata no matter what level of a course’s tree structure it is hiding in!

Who will notice the change, and where (LMS/Studio)?

Currently, this tool is available at https://coursegraph2.edx.org/browser/ (make sure you’ve logged into the VPN first!) After some team testing it’ll be available at its usual location: https://coursegraph.edx.org/browser/. Additional documentation for this tool is available in Confluence.


Results: 

Since updating CourseGraph earlier today, we have updated our XBlock Usage stats sheet, LTI Directory, and a 3rd Party Discussion Integration tracking spreadsheet. These are three example reference documents that help us use CourseGraph data to review various commonly asked course content questions.

Moving forward we hope this updated data helps accelerate triage of bugs (ex: Which courses had graded content deadlines during our last hypothetical outage? Which courses use this specific combination of features that triggers an obscure edge case bug?) while also supporting decisions on feature usage and adoption (ex: How many course teams are using AB content experiments today? the Notes tool? etc)

 

Link(s) to additional details: https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/PT/pages/3119972401

Credits: Thanks to Kyle McCormick + Ken Clary for their efforts on this, along with the entire T&L squad. Additional thanks to the SRE Teams and Support teams for their help reviewing + identifying the original issues with CourseGraph.