Thanks for doing this research, Ignacio. That all sounds right to me.
Clearly cohorted courseware would need a lot of work to satisfy your
requirements.

 - Andy

On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 6:27 AM, Ignacio Lozano <[email protected]> wrote:

> I tested cohorts and content groups for different languages and it seems
> that i could be a feasible alternative. Some conclusiones
>
>
>    - If user change the cohort, the progress is changed also (if you did
>    an English homework and move to Spanish, your score is 0)
>       - We can add the choice for a user in the enrollment process (or at
>       least the first task is shown is choosing your language) and system 
> should
>       keep the choice (the cohort)
>    - Name of section/subsection/unit is always the same (cannot change
>    based in cohorts
>    - Discussion are shared between cohorts
>    - *To sum up:* cohorts may add a partial multi-lingual capability,
>    however it is similar making different courses with some bit features
>    (shared discussion and same list of students despite of their language).
>    The XBlock approach allow you to change language at runtime without
>    altering the cohorts features (you can use cohorts for other goals)
>
>
>
> El viernes, 17 de febrero de 2017, 10:01:56 (UTC+1), Ignacio Lozano
> escribió:
>>
>> Thanks Andy for your reply.
>>
>> I see what you mean. It is a quick choice using conditional block based
>> on the locale, however I don't know how it will affects to the Analytics
>> data (content saw for a user, interactions with the video player, etc.)
>>
>> Cohorts was in my mind for the P2P exercise. Currently, it doesn't make
>> sense to assign a submission of one language to a user with a different
>> one. Cohorts could deal with this issue because you are doing one exercise
>> of your locale and you don't need to do the other exercises because are in
>> for different  cohorts. I will check that.
>>
>> On the other hand, OLX shouldn't be a problem because we are talking
>> about XBlocks and they can be exported/mported, aren't they? And Transifex
>> for rich content (HTML) should extract phrases of the HTML in order to be
>> included in the Transifex process, which I think it is too difficult for
>> integrating in the platform.
>>
>> Regards.
>>
>> El jueves, 16 de febrero de 2017, 15:57:33 (UTC+1), Andy Armstrong
>> escribió:
>>>
>>> Hi Ignacio,
>>>
>>> Thanks for this excellent post. As you say, Open edX doesn't provide
>>> great support in this area as yet, and it is a very important area. We are
>>> creating a new team here at edX to work on i18n issues (lead by Bill
>>> DeRusha) so now is a great time to agree as a community on how to move
>>> forward.
>>>
>>> I think your suggestion of starting with XBlocks is a good one, and
>>> would be a simple place to start. However, as you say, the blocks need to
>>> be moved out of the platform which complicates matters. It also seems
>>> problematic that every single block needs to become locale aware. I have a
>>> couple of ways to approach this that are more general in nature, but which
>>> are obviously bigger in scope.
>>>
>>> My first idea to consider is to provide a new container block that
>>> conditionally renders different children based upon the user's locale. We
>>> already have a container block that hasn't been made available on
>>> edx.org, but which allows child blocks to be shown conditionally based
>>> upon certain criteria (mostly successful completion of problems at this
>>> point). We could either extend that block, or provide a new i18n-specific
>>> block that is better suited to that purpose (IMO the latter is the better
>>> option).
>>>
>>> My second idea is to use cohorted courseware which already provides a
>>> great way to handle conditional content. The challenge with this is that
>>> you'd have to put users into cohorts based upon their locale, which seems
>>> complicated. However, the UI for cohorted content is much cleaner than the
>>> conditional block, in that you can click on the "eye" icon on any block and
>>> change who it is displayed to. Maybe this could be extended to work both
>>> for cohorts and for locales. You could then imagine that the block could be
>>> shown with a flag indicating that it is only shown for a particular locale.
>>> A variant of this would be to have the units themselves be conditional, so
>>> you would add a copy of each unit per supported language. I don't know how
>>> well this would work because it would be hard to see that the various
>>> copies were correctly synchronized.
>>>
>>> Thinking this through some more, in both cases it would be very hard to
>>> manage a large course. Essentially every block would need to have multiple
>>> variants, and at that point maybe you are going through as much work as
>>> building the course multiple times. Would there ever be any shared content
>>> across these courses, or would every block have to be rebuilt for each
>>> language? Maybe the key point is that the core settings of the block is the
>>> same, and it is just any text settings that have to change. If there are
>>> more of the former than the latter, then your suggestion would scale better.
>>>
>>> I hope this is helpful. I think this is a very exciting area to be
>>> improving as we try to make Open edX available to the whole world.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>>  - Andy
>>>
>>> On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 8:57 AM, Ignacio Lozano <[email protected]>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Motivation
>>>> Open edX has a large an heterogenuous student community. It is normal
>>>> to search a course in their language, sometimes even users preffer to take
>>>> the adventure of doing courses in foreign languages - then it is useful to
>>>> see the two versions of the course: in their language and in the foreign
>>>> language.
>>>>
>>>> The student option of swapping the course from one language to another
>>>> could be known as "*Multi-lingual courses*"
>>>>
>>>> Problem
>>>> Open edX hasn't a built-in multi-lingual courses capability. Therefore,
>>>> you have some workaround alternatives:
>>>>
>>>>    - Design a course per language (if you have 2 languages, you will
>>>>    design 2 courses)
>>>>       - Confusing for the student
>>>>       - Difficult to manage
>>>>       - ...
>>>>    - Add HTML blocks with JavaScript code in order to hide one content
>>>>    based on a language selector)
>>>>       - Difficult to manage in the CMS for designers
>>>>       - Only for HTML components
>>>>       - Static language and designer needs to have HTML + JS skills
>>>>       - Courses use several components, in a MOOC the basics are:
>>>>       HTML, Videos and P2P
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Approaches
>>>> Because XBlocks are pieces that can be included in Open edX when you
>>>> want. I think it could be interesting to design some multi-lingual XBlock
>>>> version based on the native XBlocks.
>>>>
>>>> HTML and Video are inside the edx-platform and i think we need first to
>>>> the XBlocks from the core. Benefits: modular design, easy to extend,
>>>> community, etc.
>>>>
>>>> Some notes in the Slack for the HTMLModule:
>>>>   CMS: change the "data" to a dictionary, add a select on the setting
>>>> form and deal with a dictionary (language => content) instead of straight
>>>> content
>>>>   LMS: Adding the flag feature and getting the content of that
>>>> dictionary (dictionary which will be stored in the mongo structure of our
>>>> xblock)
>>>>
>>>> I would like to ask to the community about this interesting topic. I
>>>> think Open edX needs Multi-lingual capability.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>> *Andy Armstrong*
>>>
>>> edX | UI Architect  | [email protected]
>>>
>>> 141 Portland Street, 9th floor
>>>
>>> Cambridge, MA 02139
>>> http://www.edx.org <http://www.edxonline.org/>
>>>
>>> [image:
>>> http://www.e-learn.nl/media/blogs/e-learn/edX_Logo_Col_RGB_FINAL.jpg?mtime=1336074566]
>>>
>> --
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>



-- 

*Andy Armstrong*

edX | UI Architect  | [email protected]

141 Portland Street, 9th floor

Cambridge, MA 02139
http://www.edx.org <http://www.edxonline.org/>

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