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.
