Deprecation/Removal: Learner View in Insights, Data API, and Analytics Pipeline

Hi all.

We propose to remove the learner view in Insights, the calls that support in in the data API and data API client, and the analytics pipeline that populates its data.

This view in Insights is out of alignment with the rest of analytics, exposing PII where none of the other views and APIs do so. Perhaps because of that it is very little developed and used.

The learner view pipeline is resource intensive and is one of our problematic Elasticsearch dependencies.

[DEPR]: Remove Learner View in Insights, Data API, and Pipeline · Issue #36 · openedx/public-engineering · GitHub has links to some of the specific code that will be removed and other details. The proposed deadline for comments is March 31, 2022.

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FYI @Agrendalath and @mtyaka – do either of your clients running Insights rely on this view?

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@jill, thanks for checking. I’ve verified that my clients are not using this view.

Some clients have the view enabled, but I am not sure if they absolutely need it; I’ll ask the clients.

@mtyaka any concerns?

@ashultz One of our clients responded with the following:

Not everyone in fact use this function, however the courses with higher enrollment do. They find it very helpful when understanding how active learners’ participation is and any videos/assessments needs modification. After having internal discussion, we would like to continue using this function.

FYI @kaustav

That’s the first actual usage I’ve heard of - we scouted around for some and after turning it off heard from one or maybe two partners who had been using learner view just as a way to look up learner email. :laughing:

If we want to keep learner view we’ll need a group enthusiastic enough about it to update learner view to Opensearch as the platform moves off of Elasticsearch.

@mtyaka one other thought - you mention videos and assessments, each of which has their own view that we are not proposing to deprecate. For general activity there is also the user activity view. All of those are summaries which avoid the whole PII problem and don’t rely on elasticsearch.

Can they get enough info on videos and assignments from the summary graphs without having to look at each learner’s module by module activity?

edx/2U has already stopped using the learner view across analyics dashboard, data API, and pipeline. In a few more weeks 2U is going to stop using the edx-analytics-pipeline entirely.

@mtyaka OEP55 is still under discussion so exactly how repos are handed over is up in the air but are the analytics pipeline repo and the learner view part of insights/data API things that opencraft would be interested to own?

Thanks for the info and sorry for the silence here @ashultz.

I didn’t get a definite answer from the client yet, but I think they’ll be able to get by with the summary graphs.

We’ll have someone from OpenCraft attend the data WG meetings to figure out how we can help.

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@mtyaka if we have one customer who might not even need learner view I think we should go ahead with deprecation. It’s either that or make sure someone is signed up to the project of moving learner view off elastic search. And someone probably has to be OpenCraft since you’re the only place we’ve found with both learner view users and expertise.

Hi @ashultz , apologies for our delay here. We’ve checked with our clients using Insights, and OK with deprecating the Learner View.

Will this be deprecated in Nutmeg, and removed in Olive?

Will this be deprecated in Nutmeg, and removed in Olive?

That was definitely my plan, hopefully we can find the time to remove the code this summer and get that into the Olive release.