As an educator, I want to be able to create a classroom so that I can invite my students in a shared space.

[lerongil]

Background

Professors need a shared space to share a Syllabus, enrol / remove students, track student reading progress, track student MCQ + homework / exam scores

Goal

A Professors should be use a classroom administration dashboard to manage and track student performance over a course

Acceptance Criteria:

• Creation of roles (Backend)
  • professor, student
  • size: M 
• Creation of a cohort (Backend) 
  • relation to classes and students 
  • size: M
• Enrolling into a cohort (UI & Process) 
  • bulk registration by a professor 
  • self registration by a students
  • size: L
• Class Visibility - Professor (Backend)*
  • relations between class and cohorts
  • remove students from a cohort 
  • size: M 
• Class Visibility - Professor (UI)
  • admin panel to add and remove classes to cohorts 
  • Size: L
• Student View (UI)
  • Navigation (Learning vs Cohort specific class page)
  • Completion of chapters from class visibility
  • Permissions based on cohort
  • Size: L
• Progress Tracking (Data / Backend)
  • Reading + Completion date: Mathigon
  • Questions + Completion date: Mathigon API
  • Number of attempts + date: new
  • Size: XL
• Progress Tracking (UI)
  • Create UI for tracking on admin 
  • Reading completion by student
  • Question completion by student
  • Table view, Graph view?
  • Filter by course
  • Size: XL
• Country Control (Backend)
  • Only applicable to cohorts owned by IBM Delivery Leads, Extend Cohort model for "require country"
  • List of countries + check logic
  • Extend Student Model
  • Size: L
• Country Control (UI)
  • If students want to join a cohort AND cohort requires a country limit, students must add their country 
  • UI for students to provide country
  • UI for professors to see the user country in panel
  • Admin panel to show blocked student by delivery lead
  • Size L

[pandasa123]

Situation

After talking to the Mathigon team, we realised the following:

• Teacher experience is not available in Mathigon Studio yet
• Mathigon open-sourcing will require quite a bit of refactoring, estimated 3 months?

We have a few options ahead

Wait for Mathigon

Why we should wait

• Mathigon does solve a few core elements already, including course creation, easy registration, integrated progress tracking across students
• We won't spend time architecting it from ground up
• We can focus on other things for self-learners that could be integrated into a teacher experience later: test banks, a scalable auto-grader, continued learning resources, curated courses, certification, basic provider integration work, scratchpad

Why we shouldn't wait

• The unknown waiting for a major strategic element is a bit concerning. We have to figure out how to track usage in courses instead? Maybe through user account onboarding experience? Or incentivise teachers with provider access?
• We still have to design and develop a custom UI / UX. The main thing we're benefitting really is this API + DB sorted out for us, which still could require changes to a schema?
• Other potential features depend on this as well, including Assignments, IBM Quantum classroom system access, classroom-wide Qiskit versions, custom content, gated content on top of this
• Mathigon is increasing focus on Polypad and subsequently deprioritising development for teacher experience?

Build it ourselves

What we would have to figure out

• Course Creation UX + API
• Course Registration via...an invite link? Code? Email? UX + API
• Progress Tracking UX + API, across Mathigon progress DB and our own user DB?

MVP Idea for Build it Ourselves

Let professors and students generate their own learning path / curated course

• Let a teacher create a private course that requires sign in, with basic course metadata
• The teacher should be able to pick all the available material across Qiskit.org, including chapters, labs, summer school
• The teacher should be able to order however they like
• The teacher can share the link with a private URL
• Student should be able to add this course to their account + see a link on their learning dashboard

What's the next best alternative

• Professors collect Qiskit links themselves and share themselves

Why is this better

• Professors can see all the content Qiskit has available without having to peruse everywhere
• Professors can manage a live syllabus, instead of a classroom
• We can instrument this with analytics and extend over time if this MVP is successful

[pandasa123]

@plegner started a PR to add Teacher Experience to Mathigon Studio. He still needs to do a bit more refactoring, but this is a low-priority effort on his side — estimated 1 - 2 months

This does handle a few things that are important to Professors, including classroom enrolments, progress tracking dashboard, basic LMS API interface design. It does not cover Syllabi or the LMSes that are more common at the university level, etc

[plegner]

We should be able to get migrate the Mathigon teacher/class code by March, which will add the following features:

• Ability to sign up as a teacher or as a parent
• Teacher accounts can create multiple classes to manage their students
• Students can join classes using an 8-letter "class code" when signing up (or by adding it later on their student dashboard)
• Parents and teachers have a new dashboard to track their students' progress
• Teachers can import student rosters from Google Classroom. We will automatically create accounts for students that don't yet have one, email them, and add them to the teachers' class
• Students aged <13 years can sign up for a "restricted account" with a guardian email. the guardian has to approve the account within 7 days, or it gets auto-deleted
• Users can switch their account type on their account profile page

We don't yet support:

• Setting assignments
• Allowing teachers to curate "custom courses" (e.g. change the order of chapters/topics)
• Integration with other LMSs like Blackboard or Canvas

However, we are planning to release the entire @mathigon/studio repo under an MIT license soon, and would love your help in adding these features.

[pandasa123]

Something to note...Tracking Progress: Typically, profs don’t track individual students. They look across a course, typically using exam distribution to identify engagement and comprehension issues. We might need to figure out how to aggregate progress later