Learner Activity Service / APIs

Abstract

A few platform services provide foundational data that we use to help convey to learners their course engagement details around engagement status / next steps. Completion, grades, and effort tools are all examples of this, providing visibility into progress and size of upcoming work. We are proposing a similarly foundational measurement of learner activity. By storing activity measures like daily / weekly / monthly engagement streaks, key milestones (ex: 20% of videos watched, 50% of assignments done, etc) these activities can be used to power various engagement plugins / features that we have described in the proposal. For the mobile experience we are interested in upgrading the “Profile Page” to be an “Activity View,” echoing the progress feeds, opportunities for social kudos, and other more dynamic representations of your learning seen in other mobile experiences.

Detailed Product Proposal

https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/OEPM/pages/4381474821/Learner+Activity+Service+APIs

Context & Background (in brief, if a Product Proposal is linked above)

Learning can be a grind, especially for new challenging topics, complex degree or higher education certificate level coursework, and we would benefit from applying a handful of motivational support tools in the platform when possible without becoming a distraction. Opinions vary widely on how many gamification hooks, streaks, challenges, competitions, comparisons, and other forms of motivators help learners take a break from the learning grind and find new energy to continue. We believe however that an activity service on Open edx that can capture major categories of learner activity would be helpful to build features and plugins that explore the space of motivational tools, plugins, etc as a supplement to basic completion, effort, and grades.

Scope & Approach (in brief, if a Product Proposal is linked above)

Our current focus is on gathering known existing tools that are connected to learner activity data to help identify common data patterns and needs across these tools.

We also plan to further specify the mobile app proposal for an Activity View as well as a Learn with Others v1 project, as these are two examples of tools we think would leverage this activity service.

From here, we hope to identify a set of broadly useful activity feed statements and identify the data helpful to aggregate and store to power other tools. Some example of this include: Streaks, Thresholds, Designations.

Value & Impact (in brief, if a Product Proposal is linked above)

Moving beyond the basics (completion, effort, grades) of learner activity status in our learner experience should hopefully expand our ability to build learner motivation tools, improve our learner outreach messaging, and encourage deeper learning engagement and continuity while learning on Open edX.

Milestones and/or Epics

TBD

Named Release

TBD

Timeline (in brief, if a Product Proposal is linked above)

TBD

Proposed By

Schema

Additional Info

No response

openedx / platform-roadmap