Introduction
Students have long been used to discussions in a brick-and-mortar classroom. Even if a formal discussion doesn't occur, there is always a bit of informal time with their teacher and classmates to discuss and gauge their understanding of the class material. Understandably, discussions have to be an integral part of digital learning and enable flexible & independent learning and knowledge construction.
There are multiple applications for discussions in a digital learning context, such as: discussions specific to certain topics, content, courses, or discussions that happen on an event like an exam, seminar, etc, or scheduled discussions where an expert is available for a specific duration. Discussions in sunbird platform should be generic and extensible to model & create different types of discussions.
Enabling discussions via Groups
The “discussions” micro-service should expose APIs that can be used to build different types of discussions experiences. For example, it should be possible to link a discussion to course batch where all users enrolled to the batch become participants of the discussion. Similarly, it should be possible to create a subject wise discussion forum at a platform level that runs forever and all users on the platform have access to this forum.
As the first use case of discussions, we want to enable the capability of attaching the “discussions” to a “group” of users and allowing all users of the group to participate in the discussion.
Groups
There are problems such as lack of learners’ focus and inadequate reflection in a digital learning environment. Good quality learning content alone is not enough for an effective digital learning experience. There is a need for multiple learning tools that should be available for learners, teachers, parents & other users for creating effective nudges and enabling effective learning. Examples of such tools are:
Progress Report: which can be used by teachers, parents or tutors to see how the learners are progressing in a course and create a course correction based on the learners' progress.
Quiz: to conduct a quiz for a set of learners to test their understanding, help them revise or for practice purposes
Leaderboard: a tool that helps learners to see where they stand with respect to their peers
Discussions: to enable collaboration between learners, teachers, tutors or any group of users
Such learning tools will be enabled via “groups” in Sunbird platform. The premise for “groups” and enabling learning tools via groups is that anyone should be able to assist any learner in learning, i.e. teachers, tuition teachers, parents, siblings, peers, senior class students, mentors or any one who is capable should be able to help any learner.
To achieve this, any user in Sunbird will be able to create a group and add users to the group (though with the acceptance of the user). Based on the needs of users in the group, the group creator can pick and add one or more learning tools to the group.
Design Thoughts
As mentioned above, learning tools should be built like plugins that can be added to a group for enabling a certain capability for the group users.
A plugin should be configurable while adding to the group and the plugin configuration for a group should be stored as part of the group data. Each plugin can use one or more sunbird micro-services or external services.
Thus, there are primarily two components to be designed and developed for enabling discussions in Sunbird:
Discussions Service: A generic micro-service that can be used to model different types of discussions. This service should expose APIs that will be used by the discussions plugin. And this service should not have an understanding of the groups or how the plugin is implemented.
Discussions Plugin: This plugin should expose a configuration that can be configured while adding to a group, have a user interface that is embeddable within groups UI and use the configuration to render the discussions for a group.