Thanks for the detailed response David! Session-backed storage for XBlocks has been the solution talked about more > internally at edX in the past. >
That's good to know. Would edX be willing to accept code contributions in this direction? Then there are the more policy-oriented questions around the control that > course teams have over anonymous access to their content -- opt in vs. out, > blocking sensitive parts because of licensing agreements or to help > preserve exam integrity, etc. I don't know of any central place where these > requirements are gathered. > Right. Currently anonymous access is controlled by a waffle feature flag, disabled by default. Since waffle flags can be toggled globally or per course, I think that's good enough for us. On Thu, Jan 11, 2018 at 4:19 PM, David Ormsbee <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Matjaz, > > I'm not on the team that's responsible for this now (that's Learner), but > I've been in conversations about this feature in the past and I just > touched base with Jasper, who is the edX product owner for this. > > EdX has been adopting a more experiment-focused approach to development, > with faster prototyping of features to assess impact and demand before > committing the resources for a large project. The PR you referenced was a > part of that. So we don't have an official commitment at this point to go > forward with this feature, or exactly what shape it will take. There is no > roadmap that I'm aware of for this. > > There's definitely been a lot of interest in this feature over the years > from the community at large. Stanford had an approach very early on where > they had pseudo-users that were dynamically generated and had enough > information for XBlock mechanisms to work. This worked, though it led to a > lot of junk in the auth_user table that needed to be cleaned up at regular > intervals. It's possible that we could fit a layer of indirection here so > that a User for the purposes of XBlocks doesn't map directly to a User in > Django, and prevent auth_user from becoming a mess. > > Session-backed storage for XBlocks has been the solution talked about more > internally at edX in the past. We already do something like this for > Studio, so that you can interact with problems that use session state while > previewing the problem. This was actually supported in the LMS very early > on in the platform (5+ years ago, back when it was still mitx), but I think > it was broken sometime during the scramble of the first year. One issue > here is what a transfer of data would look like, since it's basically a KV > store and memcached doesn't have any indexes or nicer ways to organize the > data by default when we want to do the "let's get all the user's answers > and move them over". It's possible that we could use something like Redis > here, or place restrictions on the data that we have to transfer over to > simplify things. > > Then there are the more policy-oriented questions around the control that > course teams have over anonymous access to their content -- opt in vs. out, > blocking sensitive parts because of licensing agreements or to help > preserve exam integrity, etc. I don't know of any central place where these > requirements are gathered. > > Take care. > > Dave > > > On Wed, Jan 10, 2018 at 3:25 AM, Matjaz Gregoric <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> Hello, >> >> We were happy to notice that edX is working on ability to open up the >> courseware to anonymous users in https://github.com/edx/edx-pla >> tform/pull/16315. >> Being able to browse course content without having to create an account >> first is a commonly requested feature that several of our clients have >> expressed an interested in. >> >> It looks like currently it is only possible to view the courseware >> anonymously if you have a direct link to the relevant section. We would >> like to expand on this for users to be able to: >> >> - Browse the courseware without having to know direct links, probably by >> using a button or link on the course about page. >> - Navigate through course content anonymously (currently prev/next >> buttons seem to work, but every time you click one of the buttons, an >> annoying popup asks to you sign in). >> - Interact with problems/xblocks. It probably wouldn't be possible to >> make all problem types work anonymously, but it should be possible for >> simple problems such as quizzes. >> - Store anonymous user answers (in session storage?) and move their >> responses to the database if they decide to "upgrade" their account by >> registering. >> >> Does edX plan to continue working on this feature -- is there a roadmap >> and/or any documents proposing the implementation? >> If not, would you be willing to accept something like this as an open >> source contribution? >> >> -- >> Matjaz Gregoric >> @OpenCraft >> >> -- >> 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/ms >> gid/edx-code/CALNP4FcopLQSFF-YnBZVE304RriMSbF2UT_X-mentcBskr >> NBcQ%40mail.gmail.com >> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/edx-code/CALNP4FcopLQSFF-YnBZVE304RriMSbF2UT_X-mentcBskrNBcQ%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> >> . >> > > -- > 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/CAO_oFPz%3D55T0WN0uwbFwWctmdZMzVAy% > 3DFEczp0rp8LHJ05YNLw%40mail.gmail.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/edx-code/CAO_oFPz%3D55T0WN0uwbFwWctmdZMzVAy%3DFEczp0rp8LHJ05YNLw%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "General Open edX discussion" group. 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