Excuse me while I pull up a table and a sandwich because I'm going to need a break in the middle of this.
Here's the top stuff on my mind these days: - An *Improved Grading Scheme*, and some alternatives to the current one. I have schematics and guidelines and suggestions if you'd like to see them - I filled a 10x6 whiteboard with brainstorms, and that's just the one from last week. - *Tagging and Taxonomies.* If you've talked with Braden about what came out of the Adaptive Workshop, this was a major need. I think edX did some great planning work for this over a year ago, but it never went anywhere. It would tie into not only adaptivity but also into... - A *Better Progress Page*, which could show items grouped by a variety of different factors and not just their location in the course. - *Alternative Navigation Systems.* It would be wonderful to be able to display courses to students as something other than a hierarchical list. Lots of instructors say they want nonlinear learning. Most of them, I'll admit, don't know what they actually want when they say that, but for those who genuinely have a plan for how it would work, EdX still only and always shows a straight-line view of the course where people walk from the first item to the last. - Tools for *Authentic Assessment in the Humanities*. We can do essay grading and some feedback, but we need to be able to do more. I'd love to see ways to handle portfolios, lighter-weight peer review, and small-group workshopping of ideas (this ties into Teams below) - *Better Discussion Forums.* This is a common refrain. So common that I feel like it's becoming something that gets ignored. That's not good. If edX is overrun by another system some day, this will be the key part they have that we don't. Harvard and MIT have been talking with edX about this extensively over the past year; I'm not sure what I can share of that discussion right now but I'll gladly check for you if you'd like to see what our priorities are. - *Improved Teams Features.* Again, I have an entire scope-of-work written for this, with suggestions added as to how feasible different parts of it might be (from some folks who are sadly no longer at edX). We have entire courses that aren't moving forward because of the current anemic state of the teams feature. - *Broader Partial Credit Integration.* This is a minor item and a personal one, but I'd love to see this available through markdown and in the problem types that don't currently allow it. - *Rater Weighting in Open Response*. Another minor item, but a common request - those whose ratings of peer essays are closer to the expert ratings have their ratings weighted more strongly. - *APIs.* Do these directly help instructors? No, generally not. Would it help people make better tools for instructors? Yes, absolutely. The ideas that came out of the Adaptive Workshop are a great example of something that will go nowhere if there are not APIs to support them. - A *Javascript-Accessible Student Data Store.* Just 5 MB of data that can be accessed by JS, like HTML5 Local Storage but that sticks with the learner instead of with their browser. I could do so much with this to create new tools. I'm sure I'll remember more tomorrow. I think about this a lot. I'm also happy to talk about what I *like* about edX, because there's a lot that I like. I don't want to give the impression that edX is just unfulfilled potential. Looking forward to your talk. On Monday, April 23, 2018 at 1:10:49 PM UTC-4, [email protected] wrote: > > Hi everyone, > > I'm in the final stages of preparing a talk > <https://openedx2018.sched.com/event/EUBB/an-instructional-designers-pov-a-love-letter-to-open-edx-and-how-to-make-it-better> > > for this year's Conference in Montreal. The talk will address Open edX from > an instructional designer's perspective - what's great and what could be > better. I'd like the Community's input on this, so here's a question to > educators, learners, instructional designers and administrators: > > *What learning or course design features would you like to see improved or > added to Open edX?* > > Thank you for contributing : ) > > Gabriel > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "General Open edX discussion" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/edx-code/b7f41507-6cb0-46c7-956c-8a4375c063d8%40googlegroups.com.
