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:
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 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.: