Robust Grades in open edX

[Nimisha Asthagiri]

Hello all,

For those of you interested in the grading subsystem in the open edX platform, we are planning to enhance it with persistence, events, and versions over the next few months.  For more detail, please see https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/display/TNL/Robust+Grades+Design

The primary focus for the above is to address known reliability issues.  

Regarding availability, we're happy to announce that the latest code on master provides an overall 75% performance improvement on loading the progress page.  This was accomplished by migrating the grading infrastructure to use Block Transformers, the underpinnings of the Course Blocks API.  These performance changes will be part of the upcoming Eucalyptus release.

Thanks,

Nimisha