Basic Approach questions

Owned by Jenna Makowski
Last updated: May 25, 2023
2 min read

Approach questions:

  • What does it mean to “deliver independently” of a course? What features of the platform (e.g. enrollment, grading, exams, cohorts, discussions, teams, …) should be available “independently” of courses, and which should be tied to courses? Or does it have all the same features of a course, with less hierarchy?

  • Just as there is a course outline, can we expand the types of outlines that exist in Studio to fit needs for other “products”? For example, if a user wants to deliver three units as the learning product, Studio could have a template for stringing units together and delivering them. Each outline/template would be a learning context(?) that houses all configuration metadata, effectively keeping content separate from configuration.

  • Is there a better word for “Products”? Presentations?

  • Can we avoid having nested Units? To do so, we might support the existing use case of borrowed library content inside another unit is a slightly more sophisticated version of how we'd handle a Unit that we want to make edits on by adding or subtracting a component–which would let us keep the flattened structure.

  • One idea: keep "component" and "unit", with their current definitions and everything above that is a "section" which can be nested as deeply or as shallowly as you like (e.g. no sections at all, or four levels of sections).

  • What does descriptive metadata inheritance look like?

  • Propose refactoring configuration landscape such that any data that is relevant to describing the content itself or making the content findable/discoverable in the libraries is handled in the libraries, and/or in content creation workflow in Studio. Any data that is relevant to a run or delivery of a context, whether it’s a course or whether it’s a new template/wrapper thing is handled in the LMS or Studio (?). The goal is that the content is always strippable/separate-able from the configuration

    • Emerging from the metadata definition doc (green section) is a definition of "course" as "a set of modular learning units with a timeline" (i.e enrollment + course start/end, due dates + grace periods). This "timeline" aspect also pulls in cohorting (and batch enrollment), since cohorts are at their best with concurrent learning. Timelines also lend themselves nicely to certificate generation. Modular components are still scored, and grades are compiled upward to units/sections, and neither require timelines -- so "scoring" and "grading" could remain separate from "course".