Ooh, ooh, call on me! (Pulls out 3-ring binder, blows the dust off it)
Grading
I’d love to see a more flexible grading system in edX. Everyone eventually gets used to the current one, but it was designed for the first course ever run on the platform and everything else kind of gets wedged into it. A few specific things that would help:
- Right now you can weight assignment types, drop subsections, and weight individual problems. Make it so you can weight and drop all of those.
- A “points is points” approach where the platform doesn’t bother involving subsections or types at all, and each problem is just worth the number of points it says it is.
- Assigning individual problems to types instead of whole subsections, so that you can assess learners by topic instead of by location in the course.
Teams
There’s a poll in the Slack #wg-educators channel about this, so I won’t go into tons of detail here. If you’re curious, we had a course that we were going to run on edx.org but didn’t for lack of team-based features. We had several rounds of discussion with edX that went nowhere when people left the company and institutional knowledge evaporated. We got all the way to a scope of work. Feel free to e-mail me for more if you want.
Student Data Store
I have a way to store learner-specific data in edX with Javascript. (Live-development thread here on this forum, slides from a presentation that I’ve given at the Open edX conference, instructions in the JSInput repo.) It’s a messy workaround that would make Rube Goldberg proud, but it’s the only way to do it. I’d love to have this be easier.
Discussions
There’s a vast swath of forum features that would be helpful, especially on the moderation side. We got together with MIT way back before the pandemic to create a unified list.
APIs
I have a tool that downloads all our courses. It has to use web automation to open every download page one by one, click the button, wait, check for the next button, etc. Similarly, I have a tool that adds and removes people from our staff. Same thing - it’s web automation that breaks every time the Course Team page changes, because that page doesn’t even have sensible IDs for its controls any more.
Please: APIs. If I can build these tools to use REST APIs instead of web automation, it’ll take a quarter as long to write them and they’ll run ten times faster.
Other useful items
- Prerequisite courses
- Split the Staff role into Author and Instructor (I think this might already be underway)
- Multi-course reports in Insights (or more likely its lovely successor whose name I’m forgetting)
- Course build history and rollback
- Register-once functionality for LTI tools, because when you have a course with 135 instances of one tool and have to register it 135 times that’s a lot.
- Cohorts, Teams, A/B testing, and content visibility are all weirdly overlapping and take a fair amount of explaining. Smoothing out all of that would be a lot of work, so I’m assuming it’s not in the cards, but I figured I might as well mention it.