read-only access to course

[Nate Aune]

We have a customer who is running self-paced courses (students can start the course at any time), and they'd like to give students 4 months to complete the course from the time they enroll. 

Once the 4 months is up, they want to let the student to see the work that they have completed, but the student cannot do additional assessments, assignments or lab work. Essentially, the student has read-only access to the course, but they are still enrolled so they can view any earned certificate or refer to the course content (just not re-submit any answers).

I know that custom courses allow you to specify a different due date for assignments, so maybe students could be enrolled in a custom course depending on when they start the course, and the due dates for those students would be fixed, so if they don't submit their assignments by the 4 month due date, they can no longer submit. But this doesn't seem like a practical solution, because it would require creating a custom course for every day in that 4 month period.

Another idea was to utilize the cohorts feature to move a student from a "active student" cohort, to an "inactive student" cohort, and the inactive student cohort would not have permissions to change their submitted responses. Although I'm not sure if its possible to specify that a cohort can no longer submit responses. 

I think all that can be done is to say which cohorts can access which pieces of content. So we could hide the content from a student in the "inactive student" cohort, but that's not the desired behavior - we don't want to hide it, we just want to prevent subsequent submissions after the 4 month period has passed.

Does anyone know if this is possible, and if so, where I might look to find such a solution? It seems as though self-paced courses can't have a student specific end date (timed access to a course), only a universal end date which affects all students, no matter when they start the course.

thanks,

Nate

[Marco Morales]

I'd love to discuss this further! We've talked internally about dynamically pacing students using suggested deadlines within an open "self paced" course, allowing learners to potentially even set a schedule based on expected effort per week. Some initial thoughts are shown here: https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/display/EDUCATOR/Dynamic+Self+Pacing+for+Courses

[ettayeb mohamed]

Hello,
Talking about "read only access to course" means no answers submit anymore thats it i think...
Lets let the indirect solutions away for now...

Maybe we have to add a feature to the exercices module ? Like a text field containing an end date ?

[aho...@uw.edu]

Marco and Ettayeb,

Our vision for creating high-quality, sustainable start-anytime, self paced online programs and courses in Open edX involves building a registration model where a student accepted into a program can

• ·        start a course at any time (after being accepted into a program)
  
• ·        go at their own pace
  
• ·        have a four month time limit to complete the course
  

while achieving student evaluation, mastery and student completion levels at or above our classroom and group paced online courses and pricing this new self-paced format at similar levels to our other formats.

 

Some reasons for placing a 4 month limit on course completion include:

(1) encouraging students to complete by having a deadline and regular more personalized interaction with an instructional team

 (2) funding within limits the cost of students accessing a set of services (instruction, labs,…) that are provisioned for the student

 (3) allocating instructors and course assistants to support the students by assuming an enrolled student can be active in the course for up to 4 months

 (4) ensuring students complete a course with sufficient freshness of skills and knowledge to be immediately ready to apply all of it or to continue in coursework to earn a certificate

 

While we are launching and running this new self-paced online format on Open edX, however there are some feature requests are needed to make your platform better support this valuable use-case:

• ·        When someone pays, the clock for access starts at 4 months and winds down automatically. The course time length can be configured as a setting for all students entering a course.
  
• ·        There is a report which can track both progress and time to completion by student which can easily be made available to instructors, course assistants and administrators
  
• Students can set up a schedule that ranges anytime between several days and 4 months to complete a course and the system could suggest deadlines that would be visible to students and instructors or instructional assistants
• ·        Being able to move a student to read only access after the 4 months expires
  
• ·        Having an override by student to extend read/write access time that can be controlled by course instructors or administrators