Sidebar Navigation - Product Release Notes
The Product, Design, and Engineering Teams at Western Governor’s University, Raccoon Gang, and Axim Collaborative are thrilled to offer users the opportunity to try out a new method for navigating course content on the Open edX platform! With the Redwood Release, site operators can choose to enable sidebar navigation for courses on their instance, giving learners and course delivery teams a new method for making their way through course content.
While we’re excited to share this new feature with the community, it’s important to note that this beta version contains a few known issues that we’re actively working to resolve in a future release. We encourage anyone who tries out sidebar navigation to let us know if they discover any additional bugs while using it. With the community’s help, we can aim to make this the best navigation experience it can be.
Known issues with sidebar navigation include:
When a member of the course delivery team updates the name of a course unit, the unit name updates at the top of the unit page, but does not update in the sidebar navigation.
When using content groups in a course, the sidebar navigation does not hide hidden units when a staff user views the course as a content group using the masquerading feature. Content groups work as expected for real learners in content groups. Staff can masquerade as an individual user in a specific content group to view how a member of the content group actually sees the course and the sidebar.
Course sections, subsections, and unit names may appear as missing from the sidebar navigation in sections that include content that has yet to be published.
What is sidebar navigation?
An overview
The new navigation experience allows learners to navigate through course material linearly or non-linearly via a new UI element on the side of the page that displays the user’s current course section, subsection, and unit.
With sidebar navigation enabled, learners will still be able to navigate the course linearly by using the Next or Previous buttons above and below course content.
Additionally, learners can easily navigate the course non-linearly without having to go to the Course Outline page. Learners can click on any unit in the sidebar to view that unit. The sidebar displays both the unit name and an icon indicating the type of content in that unit. The idea is to give the learner a fuller sense of what content exists where in the course, so that they can navigate it in a way that makes sense for them.
Learners can explore the contents of a subsection by clicking on any collapsed subsection heading to expand and view the units within.
Users can click on an expanded subsection to collapse and hide its units.
If a learner wants to view to a unit in another section of the course, they can click on the back button in the upper corner of the sidebar to view all sections in a course.
The user can click on any section to view its contents.
Collapsing and expanding the sidebar navigation
The learner can easily collapse the sidebar navigation at any time to view the course content in a full page format by clicking the collapse button in the upper corner of the sidebar.
The learner can revisit the sidebar navigation at any time by clicking the expand button in the upper corner of the page.
As the learner advances through the course, the expanded or collapsed state of the sidebar remains the same until the learner changes it.
Viewing completed and in-progress items
When a learner completes a course unit, the icon next to the unit name in the sidebar navigation updates to indicate that it was completed.
The icon next to the subsection name updates to a checkmark icon when a learner has completed all units in a subsection.
Similar to a completed the subsection, the icon next to the section name updates to a checkmark icon once the learner has completed all subsections in the section.
In addition to completions, in-progress work is indicated on the sidebar navigation for course sections and subsections. Once a unit is completed in a section or subsection, the icon next to the section or subsection name is updated to reflect the rough amount completed.
These in-progress icons serve to convey to the learner what sections or subsections they have in-progress as well as how much content they’ve completed for each section or subsection at a glance.