Our team’s been working on a project to implement Learning Paths for HMS. The Harvard team is currently reviewing a community product proposal to help gather further interest, which we’re hoping to bring to the community before the 17th of June.
The product proposal has been ready for a while but HMS have had some system-level changes internally, and their need for some of the use cases identified back in 2023 for the customer org admin and the customer sub org admin user types is being re-evaluated. They might not want or need the functionality to be in edX. At this point, we might either end up with a smaller proposal or a proposal with a slightly different direction.
I’m bringing this up now because Edly just shared a new proposal that overlaps with some of the work we’ve been doing, particularly this part:
Program Creation Flow
The author will be able to define new program types (eg: nano degrees, specialisations, career pathways)
The author will be able to create programs and add metadata: name, image, description, estimated duration, difficulty, etc.
Add and sequence courses within the program.
Configure conditions
Prerequisites of the programs (eg: students must know basics of python)
Mark courses as required or optional
Make course groupings within programs (e.g., “choose 3 of 5” logic, at least 1 course)
Thanks for the update @cassie, that’s useful info.
Do you know if the new proposal is fully funded? I had a quick look and couldn’t seem to find any info about that.
Either way, in terms of immediate next steps it would probably make sense for the HMS team to review the new proposal to see if it covers their needs, and list out any use cases that might be missing?
That’s what I’m thinking Elizabeth will want to do, at least.
If there is a lot of overlap, creating an entirely separate product proposal might not be the most efficient way to move forward. Seeing if it would be possible to extend the existing one could be an alternative to consider?
Yes, I think there’s definitely a lot of overlap, so I’d suggest talking to the other team as soon as possible and trying to explore the HMS use case together to see if their proposed technical approach would work for HMS, and/or if the technical approach we’ve taken so far could be used for their proposal. And likewise, for the UX - would our UX support their use cases, or their UX support our use cases, or would we each need separate UX as designed but could work together on a shared backend system?
@cassie First, I apologize for my tardy response here. Just sharing my thoughts on the feature set from the mockups.
I agree with Braden that there is big overlap here. I think that’s unavoidable as people try to expand beyond just courses. Interestingly, while HMS had focused on the student side of thing (UI wise), Edly has focused on the authoring side. While the specs are not exact, the projects complement really well. To me, the HMS’s focus on org level, role based data and the Edly’s focus on certificate tiers stand out as specific, while the rest seem very similar with the terminologies normalized. Unless HMS’s focus hasn’t drastically changed recently, they should definitely go through this proposal.
@cassie Oh! I missed the Learner Experience mockup in my previous comment. This is so similar to what we have for HMS. Only thing missing are the progress bars and the only main difference seems to be the e-commerce integration. HMS should 200% see this and provide their inputs. It could really help shape the proposal and maybe even make them more open to committing some resources.
