Improving forum notifications for users and teachers

[felipemontoya]

Abstract

Extensions to the forum notifications.

The goals would be:

• anyone can follow a forum post and be notified when there are responses. Not only the first question in the thread and not only the first author of the thread.
• there is an option for teachers or admins to follow all discussion in a course with one click
• users can choose if they want notifications to be sent individually or be aggregated for delivery once a day or week.

Context & Background

In general the communication tools with students that Open edX offers are more suitable for massive courses. They tend to fall short for the use of the platform in more personalized environments.

In the case of the forum notifications, there is an specific request from the Spanish universities to

Scope & Approach

Initially I thought this was a candidate to be developed completely using plugins and not touch anything in the core. However I was invited to a conversation about the new "notifications" app.

https://github.com/openedx/edx-platform/issues/32249

I see this as a space were we could collaborate to move some of that current notifications work to use openedx-events and perhaps make it easier to extend for the spanish use case.

Value & Impact

The value of this feature being implemented in the "extracted notifications app" would be:

• notifications gets untangled from the core platform
• the capabilities to extend the base notifications are richer and can be used by other teams
• there is at least one reference implementation of these extension points

Milestones and/or Epics

This will have to be discussed with the current maintainers of the notifications app.

Currently I would imagine:

Milestone 1:

• making the current notifications more extendable. Milestone 2:
• Develop features to follow all posts as a teacher in a plugin
• Develop different mechanisms of aggregation in the plugin

Named Release

Quince probably

Timeline

Ideally we would like to deliver this by the end of the year which puts the timeline between quince and redwood.

The necessary refactor of the notifications of the app would be closer to quince and things that can be done in plugins could follow after.

Proposed By

edunext

Additional Info

This requirement comes from the Spanish tender. About the second half of the budget account number 6.

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[jmakowski1123]

Thanks for sharing this @felipemontoya !

There are two threads I'd like to pull out from this:

1. Let's get alignment on whether the requirements from the Spanish proposal are actually going to be solved with the edX notification initiative, which as I understand is currently in design. @ProductRyan or @ayub02 , can you confirm whether the following enhancements are being implemented on the edX roadmap?

• anyone can follow a forum post and be notified when there are responses. Not only the first question in the thread and not only the first author of the thread.

• there is an option for teachers or admins to follow all discussion in a course with one click

• users can choose if they want notifications to be sent individually or be aggregated for delivery once a day or week.

2. Let's get alignment on implementation of the notifications app.

[felipemontoya]

The discussion about the extensibility in the implementation is happening in https://github.com/openedx/edx-platform/issues/32249

[ayub02]

Related docs: Product spec Technical spec ( work-in-progress )

@jmakowski1123 answers to your questions:

1. Yes. We plan to support notifications for any new activity on post and response authored and posts followed by a user.
2. Yes. All users can opt-in to receive notifications for all question type and discussion type posts, via the preferences UI.
3. We will consider creating a "forum digest" with configureable frequency after delivering the web notifications, based on user feedback. Please consult this table in spec doc for more details on the type of forum notifications we plan to support in the first release.