ENHANCEMENT PROPOSAL: Personal Online Courses (POC)

[Peter Pinch]

Despite the ambitious title, this proposal from MIT ODL and Stanford VPOL is a relatively modest MVP to allow course "coaches" to customize a limited set of course features, in order to personalize a MOOC for a small group of students. 

The proposal is below, and also on Google docs at http://goo.gl/2aQSqT 

If you have feedback or questions, please reply to this thread or comment directly on the Google doc (assuming I set the permissions correctly). 

Thanks,

Peter Pinch

Peter Pinch |  Production Manager, Office of Digital Learning

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

11 Cambridge Center  |  Cambridge MA 02142

E pdp...@mit.edu | T 617-253-6256 | C 617-652-0183

Personal Online Courses

Project Specification Document

June 11, 2014

MIT Office of Digital Learning

Stanford Vice Provost for Online Learning

(draft)

1. Overall Goals

A Personal Online Courses (POCs) is a view into a running edX course instance, with three facets customized by a teacher:

1.     Start dates

2.     Due dates

3.     Enrollment

These customizations should apply to a subset of students, whom the teacher has enrolled.  In addition, visibility is provided into the grades and performance of the teacher’s students.  Optionally, a POC may allow teachers some control over forum use.

2. edX platform code for POCs

POCs would need

• Teacher override for start dates
• Teacher override for due dates
• A “coach” dashboard for teachers, to manage enrollment
• Payment system for POC teachers and students

Notes about these four changes appear below.

POC Enrollment

Students who are enrolled in a POC need to be identified as such, e.g. so that the platform can tell which set of dates to use for a given student.  This identification can be implemented with two steps:

Add a new table (“poc_config”), with the fields:

• poc_id: unique id for each POC
• instructor user_id
• forum_settings

Add a table (“poc_students”), with fields

• course_id (of POC)
• teacher_id

The POC instructor would also need to be identifiable; this could be done using an authorization group, much like Instructor and CourseStaff are identified.

Start and Due Dates

The start and due date overrides could be implemented somewhat like the “individual due dates extension” feature is done.  However, unlike IDDE, the dates should be stored in the instructor’s courseware_studentmodule state, and not in each student’s state.

If the start date is “infinite” (ie beyond some reasonable limit), then the corresponding content is not displayed to students, but is displayed to the teacher.

Coach Dashboard

The “coach” dashboard will provide a subset of the “instructor dashboard” functionality to the POC teacher.  This should include:

• Enrollment management
• Setting of start and due dates
• Visibility into student grades and progress
• Forum management

Enrollment management should include the ability to invite students to enroll, and to add and remove enrolled students.  There should be a setting that caps the number of students who can be enrolled.  A future improvement could allow teachers to point the edX system to an authentication filter (e.g. oauth), which handles the selection of what students can or cannot enroll.

The best way to allow start and due dates would be to show each section of the courseware, and allow the teacher to see and set both dates.  It may also be desirable to allow start and due dates to be set for individual verticals or problems.

Forum management should allow access to the forum to be turned on and off.   Ideally, there would also be a way to segment the POC student forum use from other forum users.

POC payment system

This can be implemented in a future phase.

Student UI and the POC context

If a student is enrolled simultaneously in a MOOC and a POC version of the same course, there should be some way for the student to switch between the two contexts.  One could imagine the menu that originates with a username in the top-right corner of the screen (where the student logs out) being expanded to let students switch between whatever versions they're enrolled in - one or more POCs, and perhaps even the whole MOOC, e.g.:

3. Pilot Development Phases

Phase 1: Implement enrollment management and setting of start and due dates

Phase 2: Implement visibility into student grades and progress

Phase 3: Implement Forum management

Phase 4: Implement POC payment system and student UI context switching

References:

See https://github.com/flowerhack/edx-platform/tree/joinus -- “JoinUs” code written by Cale and @flowerhack.

Stanford writeup of the “coaches feature”:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pBAkKD1_ltrMgOFbYUyfrexuJ0wkV5K_pty801vXM44/edit#heading=h.mx5icwwnvbcv

[Peter Pinch]

[Jane Manning]

Peter,

I think this looks great.  Couple of minor points/questions:  

(1) Looks like a typo in the POC_students table description - it's shown with fields course_id (for POC) and teacher_id but no student_ID?  I'm guessing you mean student_id, not teacher_id (since you can presumably get the teacher_id from the poc's course_id?)

(2) I don't understand the plan of storing due dates in the instructor's courseware_studentmodule state.  Why not have a table for that?  

cheers,

Jane

[Kunal Marwaha]

Hi all,

Are there any updates to this proposal?