Current Discussion Forum Xblock design document

[Oliver Ferschke]

Hi All,

Based on all the feedback we have been collecting in various ways, we have now constructed the first "sacrificial" design document to put out there for feedback.  Feel free to be as critical as possible.  It's still early days, and we want the Xblocks contributed by DANCE to be maximally useful to the community at large.

You can find the current draft at http://dance.cs.cmu.edu/documents/XBlock_design.pdf

Looking forward to your feedback,

Carolyn and Oliver

[bharadwaj....@gmail.com]

Update on XBlock status:
   The XBlock is currently under development. So far, I have implemented the default XBlock view which allows a student to post a comment (forum style). I have also implemented a simple DB API (in place of the actual DiscourseDB API) which allows a comment to be stored (using the JS implemented controller on client) in a MySQL DB maintained on the server hosting the XBlock runtime. Additionally, the controller can also fetch comments from the database. As a simulation of server push, I have also implemented a long polling mechanism. This periodically fetches a snapshot of the database from which the UI can be updated as required. The code for all of this has already been pushed to our github account.  

   All of the above developments are currently functional in the EdX workbench, which is a quick local prototyping platform for XBlock developers and which does not require deployment to the EdX instance. However, some features (such as getting the student's id to associate comments with their owners) only work in an EdX instance. We currently do not have a working EdX instance. We should have one usable by next week following which we can continue development.

   I've also been looking into scripting techniques and thinking about developing a simple language to specify macro scripts, which can then be interpreted by our XBlock out of the box. Certain micro scripting techniques such as sentence starters, scaffolding etc. can be specified via custom UI assets (HTML,CSS,JS) which can be served up by the XBlock as part of the design. I am contacting people who might be interested in our XBlock and who might have some feedback/use cases for micro/macro scripting that we can consider. Suggestions in this regard are welcome.

   All the development so far has assumed a fair degree of autonomy such as permission to create SQL databases, custom schemas and allocate full access privileges to the XBlock user. This might not be possible in production. I have articulated some of my concerns as negotiation points which we will bring up in our next meeting with EdX, if possible. Additionally, we will be meeting with Eric Klopfer from MIT to settle on a specific use case. Once we have one, we can approach EdX with more confidence.

-Akash