Managing courses in Open edX Studio is an enriching experience, but the deletion process can be quite cumbersome. Currently, deleting a course requires navigating complex command prompts, which can be frustrating for users.
Proposal:
To enhance the user experience, I propose the addition of a dedicated “Delete Course” button in the Studio interface. This feature would enable users with the right permissions to delete courses with a single click, making course management more efficient and user-friendly.
If anyone has updates or insights on this, please let me know!
@Yagnesh I agree that course deletion using the command line is not good, but ideally course deletion should work in the admin panel for superusers, not in the studio for (all) authors. My five cents.
2U has discussed this capability in the past as well, and have always stayed away from actual course deletion. The reuse of components across runs, the certificates attached to courses, etc all made this a tricky problem.
We brainstormed the idea of just removing them from the frontend view, but keeping them in the DB. While this is non-ideal, it would solve the problem of having an ever growing list of courses to manage in the Studio interface.
I wonder, because I don’t see it mentioned… what is the specific problem you are hoping to address with this proposal?
Just want to echo @jristau1984’s point here. The reason why course deletion isn’t a truly supported feature is because there are so many things in so many systems that have links back to it. I believe the management command was mostly created to address the use case of, “I just created this course, but I actually want a different course key for it.”–i.e. nothing important has been built on top of the course yet.
Being able to delete a course is a good idea, but requires other systems to properly handle that case. Will a certificate continue to display properly after the course is deleted? (Answer: No.) Will Aspects be able to tie course structure metadata/ordering to learning events? (Answer: ?). To support it as a real feature requires going through a long tail of potentially broken systems and patching them up, and previous efforts to address this have balked at the cost/benefit balance of that work.
That could work. Were you folks thinking of an entirely new soft-delete flag, or more aggressively suppressing the display of archived courses? Though I guess deletion and archival are different enough to merit different flags…
Dummy courses created and should be deleted anyway.
Changing course keys, which could be said a problem in Opaque Keys, but anyway that’s a valid case Dave mentioned.
Reducing storage needs of the course in MongoDB. Without deletion, MongoDB bill can only grow.
Soft deletion with a new flag is_deleted=True just to reduce the list of courses from the Studio homepage.
Semi-soft deletion, in which all MongoDB data is deleted but a CourseOverview MySQL entry is kept with is_deleted=True just so the system isn’t broken.
I totally support such feature, for one data shouldn’t be perminant in Open edX. If there’s an issue we can fix individual systems on a case-by-case basis.
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