Long-term User Group Strategy

See User Group Strategy

Near-term Strategy

Our near-term strategy for implementing user group creation and management on the platform is to implement user grouping at the course level. This initial slim slice of work will deliver the ability to create, edit, view, and manage static user groups at the course level. Course delivery teams will be able to download a list of learners in a group as a CSV file and for those on instances using Aspects, users will be able to filter Aspects course dashboards to view data for learners in a user group. 

In future releases, we’ll continue to build upon the ways in which course delivery teams can create user groups by allowing them to create, edit and refresh dynamic user groups based on shared learner criteria. Further down the line, we’ll utilize user groups, so that we can facilitate targeted notifications and communications and tailor course material for users based on their interests or needs.

Because this initial slice of work delivers an important, yet slim chunk of functionality, this feature will be delivered as defaulted to OFF and marked as a beta feature for the Ulmo release. The real value of this feature will be realized once users can create static and dynamic user groups and create targeted interventions for those groups.

MVP Use Cases

See User Group Use Cases for a more extensive and specific list of user grouping use cases based on product discovery. I’ve included the groups and use cases that will be fulfilled by this MVP delivery, below:

As a course delivery team member, I want to be able to segment the users in my course based on username or user email, so that I can…

• View course enrollment, engagement, and performance data for learners in my course that meet certain criteria to better inform decisions I make about my course and/or the intervention tactics I may use.

• Easily compile and download a list of learners in my course that meet certain criteria for analysis and usage off-platform.

• Communicate with a subset of learners in my course to compel them to reengage with course material or to encourage them to keep up the good work.

  • Note: This MVP delivery will allow some course delivery teams to be able to communicate with learners by providing a CSV file with the email addresses of the users in the user group they’ve created. Reaching out to learners within a user group will still be a manual process until we are able to fully integrate user group creation with communication tools (such as email and notifications) on the platform in a future release.

Product Requirements

Epic 1: User Group Creation

As a course delivery team user with any of the following roles in the course: Course Admin, Course Staff, I can create a static group of users at the “course” level by adding the username and/or email address of the users I want to include in the group, so that I can (see Utilizing User Groups to see how users want to be able to utilize the user groups they’ve created).

There are 2 ways for me to add specific users to a group with their username and/or email address:

• By uploading a CSV file with this information

• Directly via the UI as users can currently do with cohort creation (Note: if we need to release this feature without this capability and add it in the future, this is fine).

If a user in the user group creation list is:

1. Registered with an account on the platform, but not yet enrolled in the course: They will NOT be added to the user group.

2. Not yet registered with an account on the platform: They will not be added to the user group, and the user must get a message when the group was created letting them know that N users have been added to the group. Users on the list that have not yet registered with an account on the platform have not yet been added to the user group. User groups may be edited by uploading a CSV file or by adding new users directly via the Add users form. For

As a course delivery team member with any of the following roles in the course: Course Admin, Course Staff, I want to name the user group I created, so that I have an easy way of identifying each of the groups I’ve created at a glance.

• Character limit: 50 characters

• User group names must be unique (at the course-level) 

As a course delivery team member with any of the following roles in the course: Course Admin, Course Staff, I want to be able to view the list of user groups I created, so that I have an easy way of seeing what user groups currently exist for my course.

Epic 3: Utilizing User Groups

As a course delivery team user with any of the following roles in the course: Course Admin, Course Staff, I can create a subset of users at the “course” level, so that I can…

Download a CSV file of the subset members that has the following columns:

• Name

• Username

• Email address

As a course delivery team user with access to the Aspects User Group Dashboard (on an instance using Aspects), I can filter the Aspects User Group Dashboard (currently called the At-Risk Learner Dashboard, but should be re-named as the User Group Dashboard) by a user group that has been created for the course.

Epic 2: User Group Management

In addition to user group creation requirements and requirements for how users need to be able to utilize user groups, there are a few ways in which users need to be able manage the user groups they’ve created for their course.

As a course delivery team member with any of the following roles in the course: Course Admin, Course Staff, I want the ability to edit the name of a user group, so that I can adjust the name of previously created groups to better fit my needs.

As a course delivery team member with any of the following roles in the course: Course Admin, Course Staff, I want the ability to edit the list of users in a user group, so that I can adjust previously created groups to better fit my needs.

As an instance administrator, I want to be able to access group membership changes information via the tracking logs, so that this information can be accessed if there are questions about why learner(s) were removed from/added to a user group.

As a course delivery team member with any of the following roles in the course: Course Admin, Course Staff, I want to view the following metadata for a user group, so that I am able to identify each user group and easily understand the group’s characteristics such as how the group was created, when it was last refreshed, and how big the user group is at a glance.

• User group name

• Grouping criteria (for the MVP, the only grouping criteria will be: Manually-created)

• Number of users in group

• Date last modified

Notes

1. On course re-run, user groups created manually via CSV upload must not persist.