Quick Discovery: Improved Discovery Experience [Mobile Roadmap]

Shift away from minimalist catalog discovery capabilities to match what other services support in terms of helping learners find the right course.

• Course Enrollment Pages

  • Modernize template for courses + program discovery pages (mobile + mobile web)

  • Option to show course outline + section learning objectives on mobile enrollment pages

  • Direct enrollment button into course mode view

• Recent / Popular Searches

• Pre-Login Search and Discovery - Enable catalog search and discovery prior to account creation to improve new learner experiences

• Program Catalog Discovery

• Native fully offline catalog discovery

Educators should be able to author richer course enrollment pages using Open edX. Today they can authoring Studio on the Schedule & Details page.

• The proposal is to move enrollment page authoring into its own view in Studio, but to add this view to the newer course-authoring-mfe.

• As part of this shift we will be able to add more custom fields for authoring pages and provide more customization options for others in the future to modify their enrollment pages.

• A few specific new fields are being added as part of this proposal.

Existing Metadata

• Course Title

• Course Description

• Course Image

• Instructors

• (full list coming soon)

New Metadata: Course Subtitle

• Shorter than description this could be added to enrollment pages underneath the Course Title optionally.

New Enrollment Page Option:

• Ability to show course outline ( Section + Subsection levels) as a secondary details tab in the enrollment pages optionally.

New Metadata: Course Subject

• This is conditional on some other efforts relating to content taxonomies, but if subject or other similar grouping structures exist for the catalog it would be helpful to classify courses from the Course Enrollment authoring page.

New Metadata Section: Learning Objectives

• The ability to specify course learning objectives, and the incremental improvement of the existing section learning objectives feature.

• Proposed addition of a “Learning Objectives” page in the content dropdown in Studio that would be added to course-authoring-mfe.

• This page would let you author learning objectives for the course (suggested 3-5 items) to be added as a content block (when configured) to the course enrollment pages.

• This page would also house the section learning objectives, an existing course feature put into the course outline page. Some additional detailed design work is necessary here to fully realize this incremental improvement but it should make this feature easier to use and simplify the Course Outline page.

  • Section learning objectives could be used as part of a course outline preview / detail sub-view for hte course enrollment page as is common on other learning sites. (TBD)

We would like to replace the current Open edx platform course enrollment page templates with updated visual / UI details, incorporating the new metadata added via the authoring improvements above.

Learners should be able to access their learning site’s catalog on the mobile application. Ideally this catalog could be fetched async / cached in the mobile application to streamline discovery since many open edx instance catalogs are small and vary infrequently compared to large instances. The performance gains would mean we could actually support fully native enrollment pages if we desired as opposed to mobile web views. The first discovery step is detailed below:

• Search input box with type ahead ideally to support visibility of Recent (personal) or Popular (pre-configured) catalog search values.

• Popular Subjects selection is contingent on content taxonomy work (described above in enrollment page section.

• If the learning site uses courses + programs, a toggle to see All, Courses, or Programs would be available just under the search input box.

• Course listings would render as cards (as they do today), with the introduction of Program cards as well with a different visual pattern.

  • Given catalog size, the suggestion is to sort cards by largest enrollment to smallest enrollment.

  • A plus action / icon would allow enrollment in a course without moving to the enrollment details page, letting learners stay in the ‘discovery’ flow' if they wanted to.

  • Clicking on the course / program card NOT on the enrollment button or action would take learners to the corresponding enrollment page.

(Details in the future for how the web discovery search might be improved, but doesn’t need to be part of the v1 scope of this.)

The proposal here is to bring back the programs configuration experience (a very early MFE, now archived, that would need to be rebuilt. Programs authoring UI would help elevate this functionality greatly across Open edx. Can only be authored in Django today.

A similar pattern to the course enrollment pages (with additional discovery necessary) would be added to the programs-authoring-mfe proposed.