Upcoming xBlock and course APIs from mobile team

[Nimisha Asthagiri]

Hi all,

The Mobile team at edX is planning to extend the mobile apps with generic support for accessing and navigating xBlocks in a course.  (The currently deployed mobile apps have support for only video data.)  In our initial support for xBlocks on mobile, we plan to render them through webviews as long as they have responsive UI.

In the spirit of giving you an opportunity to chime in during the design phase of this work, we are sending out this note as a pre-announcement to an upcoming design spec of this feature and an invitation to send us any initial thoughts you may have.

In the upcoming design, you can expect (based on a preliminary prototype by our team):

• A mechanism to tag an xBlock when its HTML/CSS is responsive.
• A REST API for rendering a single xBlock, without the extra chrome of the containing courseware.
• A REST API for listing all the xBlocks in a course from the perspective of the requesting user (e.g., a student).
• Design consideration for making this a generic API that can be used by non-mobile clients as well.
• Preliminary support for a participating xBlock to embed a student view in JSON form.  For example, with a native video player on mobile, the video module can send JSON data that is needed for a student view of the video.
• A REST API for delivering navigation information of a course.  For usability reasons, some LMS views (such as a mobile app) may have maximum limits on how deep to show a course hierarchy.  In such cases, it is useful to have a centralized API that returns a navigation view of the course, while handling all types of course hierarchical structures.

Our expected timeframe is as follows:

June 12th: Preliminary design spec for review

June 13th - June 26th: Design review process

June 26th: Final and agreed upon design complete

Thanks,

Nimisha

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Mobile, Technical Lead

edX | nim...@edx.org

[ishan...@theteacherapp.org]

Hi Nimisha,

Any update on this project? We are trying to extend the scope of a SCORM xBlock that plays SCORM content on web, but is not able to do on the edX mobile app. 

-Ishan

[Nimisha Asthagiri]

Hi Ishan,

This project was completed last fall and is available in the Dogwood release of open edX.

There are essentially 2 options right now for supporting your SCORM xBlock on mobile:

1. Webview: Render it in a webview after ensuring that the xBlock has responsive web layouts and support for touch-based inputs.  This is done by marking the xBlock's student view with the @XBlock.supports("multi_device") python decorator.

2. Native: Implement a student_view_data method on the xBlock and return JSON data that could be interpreted and executed natively by the mobile app.  This currently requires forking the edX app code in order to add your native implementation.  In the future, we may be able to architect the app code so it can include custom xBlock app libraries without a full fork of our repo.

The following section in the Course Blocks API wiki has more information on this:

https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/display/MA/Course+Blocks+API#CourseBlocksAPI-BlockRendering:Web,Responsive,andNative

Thanks,

Nimisha

[Samuel Marks]

FYI: Not Yet Implemented
https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/EDUCATOR/pages/29688043/Course+Blocks+API

[Nimisha Asthagiri]

Hi Samuel,

Do you have a question regarding the Course Blocks API?  The API is available for use on the platform.

Thanks,

Nimisha

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[Samuel Marks]

Hi Nimisha,

I'm developing a basic XBlock that I would also like to work on mobile.

What's the trick here?

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Samuel Marks
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[Nimisha Asthagiri]

You need to declare that the xBlock's student_view has multi-device support, as described in BlockRendering: Web, Responsive, and Native.

As an example, see the drag-n-drop xBlock's student view.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/edx-code/CAMfPbcbB5R6-g%3Dbqz%3DJSukZ-MSv1fdZsTisP-uOevBSWVu3eSA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Samuel Marks]

Thanks

Samuel Marks
http://linkedin.com/in/samuelmarks

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