New Discussions Experience - Educator Preview
TL;DR:
We have enabled an educator preview of our new edX Discussions experience, with new navigation and moderation tools to improve engagement and reduce moderation costs for courses. This preview is visible only to educators as we continue to build improvements in preparation for a full learner-facing rollout.
Release date: March 31
Product owner: @Marco Morales (Deactivated) @Aamir Ayub
What is it?
We have enabled an educator preview of the new application experience, allowing educators to see the discussion experience for their live courses using the existing and new experiences. Educators will have a way to share feedback during this period of continued development updates. The new discussion experience is the culmination of many months of partner research, UX team discovery, and development team infrastructure and application development. Over the course of the next month, additional moderation focused features will be added to this preview experience.
Key talking points for customers:
How would you sell it to customers, partners, or businesses?
Our new discussions experience refocuses learners on continuing engagement in a “My Posts” area, with improved navigation and filtering for browsing All Posts and discussion topics. The new discussion experience provides improved moderator visibility into reported content and other key moderator actions. Additionally, the new experience improves our content authoring editor, providing easier ways to include images, embed code samples, and more.
Who will notice the change, and where (LMS/Studio)?
All educators will be able to preview this experience for 45-60 days after which we hope to begin our rollout process for all learners. A new preview bar will let educators switch between the existing and new experiences as shown below.
Is there anything a user needs to do to enable the feature?
No additional steps are necessary to enable this feature, which will be visible for all educators across the edX course catalog.
How does it connect to existing or future features?
Continued development of this experience includes additional moderator updates, an improved in-context discussion experience and more. Additional milestone will roll out incrementally from this point forward into mid 2022.
Results:
A group of partners has been involved in providing early feedback to various prototypes and mockups for the new discussion experience, but this will be the first time educators across our consortium can preview and interact with this new experience. A share feedback option for educators will help ensure a smoother learner rollout after this preview period comes to an end.
Link(s) to additional details: Original Approach Memo for Discussions, Jira Initiative & Milestone Details
Credits:
A huge thanks to the Infinity squad and our OpenCraft blended development team as they have been working on this milestone for many months in addition to other discussions related milestones. Additionally, Jon Fay’s exception UX design and definition efforts have been a critical part of this effort.