Desirable features from educators/instructional designers POV

[gab...@opencraft.com]

Hi everyone, 

I'm in the final stages of preparing a talk for this year's Conference in Montreal. The talk will address Open edX from an instructional designer's perspective - what's great and what could be better. I'd like the Community's input on this, so here's a question to educators, learners, instructional designers and administrators:

What learning or course design features would you like to see improved or added to Open edX?

Thank you for contributing : )

Gabriel

[Colin Fredericks]

Excuse me while I pull up a table and a sandwich because I'm going to need a break in the middle of this.

Here's the top stuff on my mind these days:

• An Improved Grading Scheme, and some alternatives to the current one. I have schematics and guidelines and suggestions if you'd like to see them - I filled a 10x6 whiteboard with brainstorms, and that's just the one from last week.
  
• Tagging and Taxonomies. If you've talked with Braden about what came out of the Adaptive Workshop, this was a major need. I think edX did some great planning work for this over a year ago, but it never went anywhere. It would tie into not only adaptivity but also into...
  
• A Better Progress Page, which could show items grouped by a variety of different factors and not just their location in the course.
• Alternative Navigation Systems. It would be wonderful to be able to display courses to students as something other than a hierarchical list. Lots of instructors say they want nonlinear learning. Most of them, I'll admit, don't know what they actually want when they say that, but for those who genuinely have a plan for how it would work, EdX still only and always shows  a straight-line view of the course where people walk from the first item to the last.
• Tools for Authentic Assessment in the Humanities. We can do essay grading and some feedback, but we need to be able to do more. I'd love to see ways to handle portfolios, lighter-weight peer review, and small-group workshopping of ideas (this ties into Teams below)
  
• Better Discussion Forums. This is a common refrain. So common that I feel like it's becoming something that gets ignored. That's not good. If edX is overrun by another system some day, this will be the key part they have that we don't. Harvard and MIT have been talking with edX about this extensively over the past year; I'm not sure what I can share of that discussion right now but I'll gladly check for you if you'd like to see what our priorities are.
• Improved Teams Features. Again, I have an entire scope-of-work written for this, with suggestions added as to how feasible different parts of it might be (from some folks who are sadly no longer at edX). We have entire courses that aren't moving forward because of the current anemic state of the teams feature.
  
• Broader Partial Credit Integration. This is a minor item and a personal one, but I'd love to see this available through markdown and in the problem types that don't currently allow it.
• Rater Weighting in Open Response. Another minor item, but a common request - those whose ratings of peer essays are closer to the expert ratings have their ratings weighted more strongly.
  
• APIs. Do these directly help instructors? No, generally not. Would it help people make better tools for instructors? Yes, absolutely. The ideas that came out of the Adaptive Workshop are a great example of something that will go nowhere if there are not APIs to support them.
• A Javascript-Accessible Student Data Store. Just 5 MB of data that can be accessed by JS, like HTML5 Local Storage but that sticks with the learner instead of with their browser. I could do so much with this to create new tools.
  

I'm sure I'll remember more tomorrow. I think about this a lot.

I'm also happy to talk about what I like about edX, because there's a lot that I like. I don't want to give the impression that edX is just unfulfilled potential.

Looking forward to your talk.

[gab...@opencraft.com]

Holy moly! Thank you Colin for providing such a generous list. I'll definitely discuss the Adaptive workshop with Braden. And yes, what do you like about Open edX?

I'm looking forward to meeting you at Conference.

Cheers, 

Gabriel

[Colin Fredericks]

My very favorite thing about OpenEdX is the quality of the assessment tools. They're robust, they handle a wide variety of tasks, and they're extensible through a variety of methods. I like that you can randomize them, that you can pull them in from content libraries, that you can twist them in various ways with python code. I have things that I think could be improved here, but assessments are edX's greatest strength in my mind.

I think the clean look of the platform is an advantage. It's fairly easy to make new things look like they fit in.

The fact that edX permits javascript and css is a HUGE benefit for me as a course designer. It lets me add small interactives to my courses easily, and has allowed me to create lots of tools that other project leads here at HarvardX have used. That kind of customization is not present in most other systems, at least to the same extent. My own talk at OpenEdX is going to be about the pop-up question tool I wrote (for asking questions in the middle of videos), and without this permissive setup I'd never have been able to write that.

(That reminds me: another thing I'd like to see in OpenEdX is course-wide js and css, as per the Course-Wide Custom Javascript proposal.)

Inline discussion boards are pretty handy. They're so handy, in fact, that when I run a course where we initially say "Let's not use these", there's enough demand from the learners that we add them to every page.

The fact that we can do A/B Testing is great. I'd love to see it be more flexible and more content-aware, but having it at all is so important for research.

The documentation for instructors and for learners is outstanding.

There are other things that I like that are more on the philosophical side (the fact that it's an open platform, for example), but those aren't so much instructor-facing parts.


P.S.: I just remembered another item that's a must-add: more granular permissions. Right now, everyone who can edit course material can also see student grades. Sometimes I don't want to train all my content developers in human subjects research guidelines. It would be great to split that role up.

[Colin Fredericks]

Another item that came up for me this morning: content libraries. I really appreciate the existing content libraries, but they were very much seem to have been designed on a "minimum viable product" mindset, which leads to the minimum number of people actually using them. If they could deliver things other than problems, and if they could be organized in any way at all, that would really help. I know OpenCraft is working on Blockstore, which would be sort of an expanded version of these, and I partially wanted to bring this up to give you the chance to say "Yes, you'll no longer need to store all your problem banks in a huge unsortable bin any more."