RFC: Revamp the course curriculum UI and student progress tracking

[mahesh-krishnakumar]

Summary

The current approach of tracking student progress is closely linked to the course's structural element, the level. We aim to decouple these two aspects to allow for greater flexibility in course restructuring without impacting the assessment of a student's progress within the course. This separation will enable course designers to modify course content/structure independently of student progress in the course, which is tied to assignments/tasks.

This would need a phased execution, considering the volume of the changes involved. These are explained and detailed out as below:

Phase 1 - Detach student course progress from levels and introduce milestones

• Write a data migration to move milestone attribute from target group to target.
• Indicate milestone on each target in curriculum UI for students.
• Remove milestone property from target group.
• Update progress in the student report and own report (shown to students) based on percentage completion of each milestone targets. The information shown in both pages are identical and thus can probably rely on the same service which collates data
• Student distribution bar in students page and organizations page will change to the number of students who have completed milestones
• Remove association of students to level - Current student (Founder table) has a level_id column. This was required to track level based progress. This would be removed as progress can be tracked from the completion status of the ordered group of milestones. The same applies to the students grouped as a team, where the startup table holds the level_id.
• Remove manual level up logic. This is used to process level up once students invokes level up from the UI after completion of a level.
• Remove level progress from all UIs, such as check mark in level dropdown in curriculum.
• Use the cached data to decide which level should be loaded first when a student visits a course curriculum page for the first time (or the last viewed target).
• Update course completion timestamping to mark itself when all milestones in a course are completed.
• Cleanup all course progression services based on levels. We currently have an option to control how far a student can level up after completing a particular level. This course's progression setting will not be relevant, and everything will be tied to the targets that are grouped as milestone in a level.
• Allow prerequisites between target to be set between levels. This can be used to ensure that higher level milestones are performed only after lower level ones as per the current flow.
• In the students page and the review page, clean up level based filtering. This would mean also removing level indication in each student in the list and also in a submission.
• Migrate the current level progression mechanism to the new one. The number of allowed level ups should map to the number of allowed pending submissions for different targets before allowing submission for a new target.

Here is how UI changes will roughly be for showing course progress after completion of Phase 1 - milestones being made the way to track progress:

https://www.figma.com/file/tkL4qlaMS7Cd179lwF3ySJ/RFC-Pages-for-Curriculum-Phase-1?node-id=0%3A1&t=yEmoSyC8tpEnE0Eq-1

Both students page and individual student report page are show above.

Phase 2 - Move assignment details outside the targets table and group assignments into milestones

• Create assignment blocks similar to content blocks, with a target_id column (but not target_version_id) for association with the target. This would hold information about the quizzes, target checklists etc.
• Extract the current details' editor as an independent assignment editor. Not required in this phase as assignment is associated with target
• Create a dedicated assignments page in the student's UI that lists all assignments. wouldn't be required, can continue to use the current flow and is applicable in Phase 3
• Add a link from student's view of target content to the assignment's show page. Not required. Refer to item above
• Cleanup submissions section from target content. As in the item above, it will be a separate page to tack assignment linked to a target and move away from the current Submissions & Feedback tab inside a target.
• Create data migration to generate assignments.
• Set up prerequisites between assignments based on the existing level structure so that we can maintain the current flow and progression of courses.

Phase 3 - Implement pages editor, student view, and migrate from targets to pages

• Cleanup levels and its usages.
• Create a detailed plan for migrating existing targets to pages in the backend. A rough plan for the migration of target data to pages is listed below:
  • Create a root page that would have the course title as a markdown block to show the start of the course
  • Iterate over each level and create a subtitle with level name using a markdown block. Below this level subtitle, create pages for each target group inside the level in the order depicted by the target group sort index. If there is any level zero content, make a separate title Annexure/Resources after all the main levels, towards the end of this root page and create pages for each target group inside it.
  • Inside each level page, create pages with current target group titles in the order depicted by the target group sort index.
  • Inside each target group page create pages for each target currently in the course in the order of target sort index.
  • Create content blocks inside each target page in the same order as the current target content block.
  • In each target page towards the end of the content, add the linked assignment blocks created in phase 2 of the migration. If it is a mark as complete target, create a simple acknowledge assignment block.
• Implement the full UI for pages editor and student view based on the provided Figma design.https://www.figma.com/file/5rjyHEdkjMPmkOWv6PHN9p/curriculum-UI?node-id=415-7060&t=olcnMogIZQhYSjqK-0
• Drop targets and levels tables after migration to pages is complete.

[ifedan-ed]

Great