Conversation moved to the Open edX forum. Please respond on this thread.
Hi everyone,
I’m working on a product proposal to introduce notifications in Studio and would really appreciate your feedback on the best approach to take.
The primary goal of these notifications would be to share Open edX news with instructors and course creators. We’re aiming for a solution that’s lightweight and doesn’t require extensive development but could be expanded in the future if needed.
I will share what I’ve written for the “Proposed Solution” section of the proposal in a comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts on whether this approach works or if you have other ideas or suggestions. Your input would be incredibly helpful!
To leverage the existing marketing efforts used to publish content on openedx.org and the Open edX forum, we propose pulling relevant news into Studio via a simple RSS feed. Both WordPress, which powers the Open edX site, and Discourse, the platform for the Open edX forum, provide RSS feeds by default (website feed and forum feed). We can curate the content included in the feeds by using tags or categories.
Now that we have the feed URLs, the next step would be to present the content in a user-friendly format within Studio—possibly using a panel similar to the edX Notifications Tray. A notification panel like this would allow users to see a list of notifications without navigating away from the current screen.
In addition to the above, users should be notified when new content is available in the feed, and have the ability to manage their preferences or unsubscribe.
I think presenting this content is quite easy, and we can probably create a quick component and a plugin slot so it can be removed by people who don’t want it. It’s probably under 10 hrs of work.
That said the following is what makes this complex:
I don’t think this is a good idea, and it will require a lot of effort to implement, and I feel it duplicates existing functionality. The above takes it from the range of a 10-hr task to the range of a 100-hr task. What would be better is to simply link people to the Discourse and WordPress so they can choose to follow it if they want, and use the tools on those individual platforms to manage their notifications.
@Ali Using RSS makes sense - however, reusing the RSS produced by the website and forum would probably be a bit spammy, and many people might tune out the notification bell quickly.
I think, especially at first, I would opt to handcraft the posts being published there, to push them to learners or instructors only when there is a need on the project end to ask or communicate something important. We will get more attention on the things we will care about communicating this way.
Also, maybe we should discuss this on the project’s forum, no?
I’d agree that having notifications for the forum activity would be pretty spammy. There are two ways we could probably do this:
Only have notifications when there’s some high priority post (like a new upgrade available) or…
Don’t have notifications, but rather highlight critical entries in the feed to show they’re important (such as security warnings, new releases, or announcing the conference-- the big ticket items). This would probably mean creating a dedicated forum area where only certain approved people can post big updates. The critical items could be sorted toward the top, with other items showing up most recent after that.
An intersection of 1 and 2-- only have the feed show the most important items, and make them prominent. This would limit the variety of content posted, but would potentially prevent the content from refreshing so often that it’s instinctively ignored by people who don’t follow closely.
The latter would probably resolve @kshitij 's objection while allowing you to still highlight important items. I would imagine that most team members do visit the front page of studio, as the front page is useful for browsing all your classes that you’re authoring, so we can be pretty sure they’ll see it, or see them every so often at least.
For most users of studio, community updates are unlikely to be worth the trouble of some notification they need to clear. They’re primarily course authors focused on their work. But a team is likely to have quite a few people who use the studio, so one of them noticing a post about an newly released upgrade or a conference could prompt them to learn more and contact their team about it, for instance.
@Fox I would advocate to not reuse existing blog posts or forums posts for this at all, especially at the beginning. If we do use the notification counter in the LMS & Studio that we discussed – ie something like this:
This will show up potentially on every LMS & Studio page for millions of accounts. Imho this way of communicating should be rare and special, and for things that we want to communicate to the broader community. Otherwise, we will inevitably end up with things that have not been written for that audience (the blog has a VERY confidential audience compared to the wide Open edX user community), and individual instances might be more likely to disable/remove it.
Imho those notification messages should be brief, ie 1-2 sentences written especially for that context and those users, which they can read in 2-3s to get the gist. That small text could contain links, including to blog posts or forums, if the user is interested to learn more.
Thanks to everyone for the feedback so far! It’s a big help.
@farhaan I thought of using a counter like the one in this image to show users when there are unread messages in their inbox. When the inbox is opened, unread messages could have a different style to make them stand out from the ones that have already been read.
@kshitij Thank you—this is really helpful, especially since we’re aiming for something that doesn’t need too much development.
@antoviaque I agree that posts should be handcrafted. This is more or less what I had in mind with using tags or categories to curate feed content. I’m not entirely sure how it would work, but the idea was to create posts in WordPress specifically for the Studio notifications (so they wouldn’t appear anywhere on the Open edX site). This way, admins could write short updates that translate well into brief, easy-to-read notifications.
The benefit of this approach is that it takes advantage of WordPress’s admin tools without the need to build a separate service. Initially, I thought we could use the forum for this too, but on second thought, it might not actually work.
I guess the alternative would be to build a new application with an admin interface and authentication. Is this what you had in mind?
@antoviaque Oops, seems obvious now! Thanks, I’ll start a thread there that links to this one.
@fox Do you know if the forum allows admins to create content that isn’t publicly visible on the forum itself? I’m wondering if it could be used to draft notifications that would only appear in Studio via an RSS feed. That said, I’m not sure if it’s possible for something to be private on the forum but still have a public RSS feed…
@fox Interesting—I had assumed the notifications would be accessible from any Studio page, like the bell icon on the wiki). Do you think they should only be visible on the Studio homepage?
I think it’s totally fine to just use WordPress with an appropriate tag for this. All blogs posts on openedx.org already link to the forums for discussion, so I’m not sure if it’s necessary to have a forum feed as well, other than perhaps “here’s what the community is discussing right now”. I think in that case it’s okay if it’s not curated, if it just shows a few top/active posts from the educators category. We don’t need to track if they’ve read it, just having that widget there will expose them to a rotating list of discussion and give them an idea that they too can participate in such discussions and get answers.
I think if you just have two widgets, one to list “Announcements” and another for “Community Discussions” that should be good. It can just be in the sidebar since tracking if people have read it or not isn’t vital I feel.
I’m moving this conversation over to the Open edX forum. I’ll link to this thread from there, and write a summary of everyone’s feedback so far. Please use the new thread for any future responses.
Conversation moved to the Open edX forum. Please respond on this thread.
