Open edX Instructor-Learner Communication - Current State, Gaps, and Opportunities
The current tools for instructor-to-learner communication in Open edX are as follows:
Bulk Email
Course Updates
Course Highlight Emails
I’m not going to go into immense depth with these, but will instead highlight areas of improvement based on comparison to tools available in other LMSes, and the needs of instructors in these areas.
Bulk Email
The bulk email tool lets staff send a single email to the following groups of users:
Themselves
Staff/Administrators
Learners in each enrollment track
Learners in each cohort
All learners
Emails are authored in a simple WYSIWYG interface, and can be scheduled for a future date:
Areas for Improvement
Emails cannot be sent to groups of specific learners outside of Cohorts (such as “these 15 specific learners”)
Emails cannot be sent to learners who match patterns beyond those preset (such as “learners who have not earned a grade above 70% in Section 1”)
Emails cannot be sent to specific learner teams (“Learners in team: Red”)
The time zone for email scheduling is not clearly stated
The editor itself seems buggy, particularly with code blocks:
The only button being pressed in this gif is the left mouse button.
The default appearance of these emails is unclear, and things like fonts default to black Times New Roman, which is likely not anyone’s brand style.
Accessing the interface requires navigating to a MFE on a completely different page, which is a poor user experience shared by almost all new MFEs.
Course updates
Course updates no longer truly exist. I’ve included them because they’re not on the list, but effectively the course updates feature has been removed from Open edX despite being displayed in the UI, as they were repurposed to frankly worthless Welcome messages way back in Hawthorn.
The course updates UI in Studio looks like this:
The stated purpose along the top is:
Use course updates to notify students of important dates or exams, highlight particular discussions in the forums, announce schedule changes, and respond to student questions. You add or edit updates in HTML.
However, as course updates were updated to be used as course welcome messages, updates only appear for 7 days. This is fundamentally worthless to self-paced courses (as the welcome message is gone for all learners after 7 days when the course is live, not just for learners who have been enrolled for 7 days).
Learners do not see anything other than the most recent “update”, and have no way of viewing the history. For example, in Studio:
In the LMS, learners see this:
Once dismissed, the update is gone forever.
The experience of creating course updates is also poor, requiring HTML input with no WYSIWYG experience.
Areas for Improvement
Honestly, everything. There is no single piece of this functionality that is fit-for-purpose, from the process of their creation to how they are viewed by learners. This needs to be properly scoped as a feature, but here are a few obvious needs:
Visibility of course updates needs to be improved, as they are only visible from the course outline, which is seldom seen by learners once they have started their course, anecdotally, particularly on short courses
For example, new updates could be signalled to learners from within the course experience itself, or via a notification, email, and/or the course dashboard.
The authoring experience of course updates needs to be WYSIWYG, not raw HTML.
Updates need to have static URLs so that they can be shared as links in emails, on discussions, and in-content.
Previous course updates should be viewable by learners
Commenting on announcements should be an optional feature to act as an engagement tool, with Canvas-style comment hiding functionality and moderation tools.
Updates need the option of also being automatically shared via bulk email.
Course Highlight Emails
Course highlights have a prominent button at the top of the course outline, as well as a link at the top of each section of the course:
Clicking the Learn More button takes the user to this page of the edX documentation. Clicking enable takes you to a warning message about enabling the feature:
Once enabled, the button in the outline changes to plain text saying “enabled”:
Clicking Section Highlights on a section opens a modal window with 5 fields for plain text with a 250-character limit:
No other content can be included in highlight emails.
Areas for improvement
The link on “Learn More” in the course outline is actually a semi-dead link, it functions without 404, but attempts to link to the heading “#set-section-highlights-for-weekly-course-highlight-messages” when the documentation has been changed and the heading it needs is actually “#set-section-highlights-for-highlight-emails”.
The button to send highlights and links to define section highlights appear even if emails aren’t actually configured for use. Staff can set up and enable highlights without them actually being functional or receiving any warning about this, other than a note buried in the documentation to ask your administrator if the feature works.
You cannot disable highlights after you start sending them.
It’s unclear when section highlights actually send, as it’s not mentioned in the documentation, and staff have no control over this.
The emails themselves always match the template set by the administrator, and can only contain plain text. No links, no images, no contextualising message, just 250 character limit lines of text.
The documentation mentions an example email which doesn’t exist, presumably because the template
All of this means that staff have absolutely no way of previewing the message or this functionality without a site operator configuring the entire feature, defining a template, creating a testing course, setting up highlights that cannot be disabled, and sending highlight emails.
I guess theoretically you could send the template email manually and fill the text areas that would be filled by the feature. It’s still a pretty awful workflow, and I have zero doubts that this stops at least a few people from using it.
Overall I honestly can’t find a positive thing to say about this feature other than that it’s a really good idea that can help staff keep learners engaged, if it was more of a usable feature. It’s featured so prominently that the current state is enough to derail me this far, but we’ve got this far, so the ideal version of this feature looks something like this in my opinion:
A connection between content and the highlights (i.e. highlight something and link it to that subsection or unit of the course)
Flexible options for when highlight emails are sent:
When learners are at risk of disengaging (“You’ve not studied the section you’re in for a week, here’s what you’ve not gotten to yet”)
When learners complete over x% of the previous section (“You’re almost done with section 2! Check out what you have to look forward to:”)
X days prior to the release date of the associated section
Fixed relative dates (Y days after course start date)
Contextualising content beyond the actual highlights (“We’re over halfway through the course! Check out what’s coming up next”)
Rich content insertion and editing for highlight emails (not just plain text - links, images…)
The ability to disable highlights after enabling them, temporarily or permanently
When not enabled, the configuration for setting section highlights should also not appear as it is meaningless clutter.
Warning messages when the feature is non-functional
Better in-app guidance rather than relying users going and reading the documentation (because they don’t)
Highlight email previews and testing (“Send me a preview of this highlight email”)
Analytics and reporting for highlight emails to prove their effectiveness
What percentage of disengaged learners re-engaged after clicking a link in a highlight email?