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. 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 initially started this conversation on OpenCraft’s forum, but it makes much more sense to get the whole community involved. Here’s a summary of the feedback received so far:
Add notifications via a component/plugin slot so it’s removable for users who don’t want notifications
Allowing users to manage notification preferences can get complex. It might be better to allow users to choose what to follow/unfollow inside Discourse/WordPress
Allow admins to handcraft notifications (especially at first). Simply displaying content from the blog or forum might lead users to disable/remove the notifications feature
Notifications should not appear “spammy”
Notifications should be rare and special
Notifications should be 1-2 sentences, and readable in 2-3s
Studio users are primarily course authors focused on their work. They might miss notifications, or become annoyed by them
I know from talking to a few course authors this past fall that a very popular request is to receive a notification any time there is a new discussion post. (cc: @john_curricume)
I also feel like as a user, I think I’d only expect to see notifications about the course I’m looking at and/or the course(s) where I’m listed as staff if this notifications sidebar were in Studio, but this is a guess. Would require more user research to confirm.
@ali_hugo Responding to your question in the other thread:
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?
Echoing what @Chelsea_Rathbun said above, it seems like a lot of dedicated screen real estate for something that’s expected to be rare, and may not be relevant to the majority of users. It should be available and easy to come across for users, but it would seem weird to have a dedicated notifications button on studio for broadcasts from the community. The studio home page seems like a place most folks who use Studio will visit at least once a day, so it seems a good place for such notifications without taking up dedicated screen real estate everywhere, or giving the impression that the functionality is much wider than it is.
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…
I don’t know, but I would suspect not. I don’t think it would be too terribly difficult to add such a thing and contribute it to upstream, but I wouldn’t know for sure. Even a little microservice that just provides these updates in an RSS feed wouldn’t be especially difficult to write and maintain if we decided to go that route instead of the forum.
@Ali Reusing the admin interface of Wordpress makes sense The main thing there, to make sure we do carefully weight the need to push something to the whole community this way, would be to not make it too easy or systematic.
For example, if we just add an extra field for every blog post form, then we will encourage pushing the news for every blog post, even if that field is optional and leaving it blank doesn’t push the news to students/instructions. Having a completely separate category, with the need to create a new post for each news update, would make us think twice every time?
As an instructor, I never visit the Studio home page, I always go straight to my bookmark of the course’s home in Studio, or access it through the a direct link from the LMS. The only time I would go there is if I need to create a new course.
Imho adding a little bell in a corner isn’t bothersome, especially for something as important as giving visibility to the Open edX project to its community of users? If it takes too much real estate, it could only be shown when there is new news, but imho it could likely be made unobstrusive. The bell/icon doesn’t need to be a big flashy button, only the unread flag needs to be flashy - and as noted the goal is to use it with parsimony. But when we will use it, we do want to attract all users’ attention to it - that’s the whole point of the change?
Greetings all. I’m about to go to production with this, albeit for the LMS. My solution is based on firebase-admin and cronitor in the backend, and react-redux-toastr on the frontend. it should be easy to extend to Studio. Happy to share more, including the code, once it’s deployed.
Please note that this proposal is currently focused on delivering Open edX platform news, not course-related notifications. That said, I agree it would make sense to use this feature for both types of notifications in the future.
@Chelsea_Rathbun I just want to confirm whether I’m interpreting this correctly. Are you saying that if this feature were displayed on Studio course pages, you would only expect to see course-related notifications and not general notifications about the Open edX platform?
I agree with @antoviaque that a bell icon in the main navigation wouldn’t be too intrusive (I hardly notice the bell on the wiki unless there’s a new notification). If I’m not mistaken, the bell is also visible on all pages of the edX LMS.
You raise an interesting point about the bell icon potentially giving the impression that the functionality is wider than it actually is. We may need to find a way to manage user expectations—though I’m not yet sure how!
I agree. Having a dedicated space in the WordPress admin for creating these updates makes sense. It would be great, if possible, to include a description in the admin interface explaining when news updates should be posted and when they shouldn’t.
@lpm0073 Thanks for letting us know about your work on notifications for the LMS. It would be fantastic if you could share a bit more about your approach when you’re ready—a couple of screenshots would be great too!
Are you aware of the work being done on LMS notifications by the Infinity team at 2U? It’s not yet available on Open edX, but the plan is to add it in the future.
I agree. There are lots of ways we can ensure this is unobtrusive.
I also agree that if we introduce notifications it should serve all future “types” of notifications.
Forgive my ignorance here, but initially will all notifications be fed into the tray? And the user will need to curate their preferences over time? I’m just trying to understand how overwhelming it could be for the user at the start.
I think this is a great initiative in making features more visible to end-users. Right now there are so many channels users need to peruse to stay updated with any changes - in my mind this consolidates things a bit more. Another idea (possibly in time) could be to fetch the latest info from the docs too? I see GitHub also provides RSS feeds as well. Some newly published guides could be a great way to advertise new features.
The idea is to start small by only showing users news related to the Open edX platform (there won’t be any course-related updates, forum notifications, or other alerts initially).
I’m not sure what preference settings will be available to the user in the beginning, but I imagine they should be able to turn platform news off (I think it should probably be on by default so users are more likely to notice the feature).
We’ll need to ensure the notifications don’t come across as “spammy.” I think @antoviaque’s suggestion about using the Wordpress interface to handcraft notifications could help with this. This approach would allow us to decide whether to include updates from the Docs site (or other sources) in the Studio notifications and ensure they are well-crafted to fit the notification format.
@Eden_Huthmacher Since you’re always on the ball with all things “marketing” in the Community, could you confirm whether the new Open edX site will be built using Wordpress? This information will help us determine the best approach for drafting notifications.
The main thing there, to make sure we do carefully weight the need to push something to the whole community this way, would be to not make it too easy or systematic.