Group work, collaboration in Open edX

Development Collaborative Proposals
1

I’m wondering if anyone has experience with enabling any sort of group work or collaboration in their Open edX sites.

An applicable example is the Group Project XBlock (v2) though it is only supported in an edX fork for now.

Thanks!

2

Yes that app needs certain APIs that are only available in the solutions fork and needs some additional extensions installed to work.

It might be interesting to re-evaluate how it’s using those APIs and see if there are equivalent APIs in the core platform that it can use instead. Or if it can work in some capacity without those APIs. Currently the extensions it uses are not pluggable in the way Hawthorn expects, but that is also a possibility to enable the additional APIs it needs.

3

Hi @nsprenkle, definitely a bit of a pain point with the folks I work with using Open EdX. Right now, my solution is largely manual, and only for smaller sized courses. It consists of:

  1. Manually assign students into groups
  2. Write instructions for a group, and advise students to have one member of the group submit the assignment
  3. Accept submissions via Staff Graded Assignment Xblock
  4. Assign grades and feedback to each member of the group via Flex Grader Xblock

Definitely not winning any hearts and minds for Open EdX. Interested in following this chat to see what other folks are doing.

4

Hi, @nsprenkle

Which version of open edx are you using with Flex Grader Xblock?

5

@sbernesto, Hawthorne is the latest I’m using it with.

6

@john_curricume A lot of the logic and UI for the Group Work XBlock is available - there would be work to adapt/contribute the APIs from the solutions fork upstream, but it’s small compared to the overall amount of work that went into that XBlock. It is a substantial investment that is available openly, if anyone is willing to contribute the APIs. Let me know if you are interested. :slight_smile:

7

@antoviaque, definitely interested. I’ll reach out about connecting after the holiday.

1 Like
8

Update: Xavier and his team at OpenCraft have laid out the current group work Xblock, and it is on my teams plan to have a look at his this can be incorporated into an Xblock that can be used with the regular edx-platform.

@nsprenkle, related question. I see a few feelers from the EdX guys asking about Group work in this forum. It’s something on my mind and was going to put in a session proposal for the conference. But don’t want to step on toes if you all are already planning a session on it. Are you?

1 Like
9

Might this new feature in Juniper be what you’re looking for?
https://edx.readthedocs.io/projects/open-edx-release-notes/en/latest/juniper_learner.html#teams-application

" Team Assignments: Educators can now create team assignments, enabling a team of students to collaborate on the assignment and submit a team response through a linked Open Response Assessment problem. (Additional details in the Open Response Assessment updates section)."