flow-control-xblock 1.0.1

Flow Control XBlock

The Flow Control XBlock provides a way to display the content of a unit or to redirect the user elsewhere based on compliance with a condition that evaluates the submission or the score of a problem or a set of problems.

Installing on Open edX Devstack

Inside both LMS and Studio shells, using make lms-shell and make studio-shell in your devstack directory do:

pip install flow-control-xblock

However, if you want to further develop this XBlock, you might want to instead clone this repository and do:

pip install -e path/to/flow-control

Enabling in Studio

After successful installation, you can activate this component for a course following these steps:

• From the main page of a specific course, navigate to Settings -> Advanced Settings from the top menu.

• Check for the Advanced Module List policy key, and Add "flow-control" to the policy value list.

• Click the “Save changes” button.

Usage

Include the Flow Control component in the content unit you want to control access to, and follow these steps on “settings”:

• Select the condition to check.

• Enter the problem locator ids (as many as required) to evaluate the condition.

• Select an action to apply when the condition is met.

Development

You can install this XBlock’s dependencies for development by performing:

make requirements

Common use cases

Flow Control can be used whenever you need to control the available course content based on grades obtained by a student, on one or more evaluated problems in the course. Also, it is possible to check if those problems have been answered or not. Some common uses cases are:

• Only allow the learner to see unit B when a problem in unit A has been answered, otherwise displaying a explanatory message.

• Only allow the learner to see unit B when a problem in unit A has been answered, otherwise redirecting to unit A.

• Only allow the learner to see unit B when a problem in unit A has scored above a certain threshold.

• Present further explanatory content to learners that did not answer correctly a certain problem, while redirecting to the next unit learners that did answer correcly.

• Display a message congratulating the learner for passing an exam, or a message notifying the exam wasn’t passed.

• Display a message notifying the learner that some of the exam’s questions have not been answered yet.

• Used in combination with the subsection prerequites feature to better explain the learners why certain subsections will or will not be made available to them.

Features include

Studio editable settings: Allows to select the conditions and operators to evaluate and the actions to apply in a particular unit.

Condition types: Currently, the xblock features evaluating the score of a single problem and the average score of a list of problems.

Condition operators: The implemented operators are:

• Equals

• Not equal to

• Greather than

• Greather than or equal to

• Less than

• Less than or equal to

• Is empty

• Is not empty

• Has empty

Actions: This actions can be applied when a condition is met:

• Display a message

• Redirect to another unit in the same subsection (without reloading the page)

• Redirect to another unit using jump_to_id (reloading the page)

• Redirect to a given url

WYSIWYG editor: A simple to use HTML editor to simplify writing the content or message that learners will get if the condition is met.

About this XBlock

The Flow Control XBlock was built by eduNEXT, a company specialized in open edX development and open edX cloud services.

It was presented at the open edX con 2016 at Stanford University.

How to Contribute

• Fork this repository.

• Commit your changes on a new branch

• Make a pull request to the master branch

• Wait for the code review and merge process