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an app that aggregates block level completion data for different block types for Open edX.

Project description

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openedx-completion-aggregator is a Django app that aggregates block level completion data for different block types for Open edX.

Overview

openedx-completion-aggregator uses the pluggable django app pattern to ease installation. To use in edx-platform, do the following:

  1. Install the app into your virtualenv.

    ..code_block:

    $ pip install openedx-completion-aggregator
  2. [Optional] You may override the set of registered aggregator block types in your lms.env.json file:

    ...
    "COMPLETION_AGGREGATOR_BLOCK_TYPES": {
        "course",
        "chapter",
        "subsection",
        "vertical"
    },
    ...
  3. By default, completion is aggregated with each created or updated BlockCompletion. In most production instances, you will want to calculate aggregations asynchronously. To enable asynchronous calculation for your installation, set the following in your lms.env.json file:

    ...
    "COMPLETION_AGGREGATOR_ASYNC_AGGREGATION": true,
    ...

    Then configure up a pair of cron jobs to run ./manage.py run_aggregator_service and ./manage.py run_aggregator_cleanup as often as desired.

Note that if operating on a Hawthorne-or-later release of edx-platform, you may override the settings in EDXAPP_ENV_EXTRA instead.

Design

The completion aggregator is designed to facilitate working with course-level, chapter-level, and other aggregated percentages of course completion as represented by the [BlockCompletion model](https://github.com/edx/completion/blob/master/completion/models.py#L173) (from the edx-completion djangoapp). By storing these values in the database, we are able to quickly return information for all users in a course.

Each type of XBlock (or XModule) is assigned a completion mode of “Completable”, “Aggregator”, or “Excluded”.

A “completable” block is one that can directly be completed, either by viewing it on the screen, by submitting a response, or by some custom defined means. When completed, a BlockCompletion is created for that user with a value of 1.0 (any value between 0.0 and 1.0 is allowed). Completable blocks always have a maximum possible value of 1.0.

An “excluded” block is ignored for the purposes of completion. It always has a completion value of 0.0, and a maximum possible value of 0.0. If an excluded block has children, those are also ignored for the purposes of completion.

An “aggregator” block is one that contains other blocks. It cannot be directly completed, but has an aggregate completion value equal to the sum of the completion values of its immediate children, and a maximum possible value equal to the sum of the maximum possible values of its immediate children (1.0 for completable blocks, 0.0 for excluded blocks, and the calculated maximum for any contained aggregators). If an aggregator has a maximum possible value of 0.0, (either it has no children, or all its children are excluded), it is always considered complete.

To calculate aggregations for a user, the course graph is retrieved from the modulestore (using block transformers) to determine which blocks are contained by each aggregator, and values are summed recursively from the course block on down. Values for every node in the whole tree can be calculated in a single traversal. These calculations can either be performed “read-only” (to get the latest data for each user), or “read-write” to store that data in the [completion_aggregator.Aggregator model](https://github.com/open-craft/openedx-completion-aggregator/blob/master/completion_aggregator/models.py#L199).

During regular course interaction, a learner will calculate aggregations on the fly to get the latest information. However, on-the-fly calculations are too expensive when performed for all users in a course, so periodically (every hour or less), a task is run to calculate all aggregators that have gone out of date in the previous hour, and store those values in the database. These stored values are then used for reporting on course-wide completion (for course admin views).

By tracking which blocks have been changed recently (in the [StaleCompletion table](https://github.com/open-craft/openedx-completion-aggregator/blob/master/completion_aggregator/models.py#L272) table) These stored values can also be used to shortcut calculations for portions of the course graph that are known to be up to date. If a user has only completed blocks in chapter 3 of a three-chapter course since the last time aggregations were stored, there is no need to redo the calculation for chapter 1 or chapter 2. The course-level aggregation can just sum the already-stored values for chapter 1 and chapter 2 with a freshly calculated value for chapter 3.

Currently, the major bottleneck in these calculations is creating the course graph for each user. We are caching the graph locally to speed things up, but this stresses the memory capabilities of the servers. My understanding is that more recent versions of edx-platform do a better job caching course graphs site-wide, which should improve performance, and allow us to bypass the local calculation, though this will need to be evaluated when our client (which is currently on ginkgo) upgrades.

License

The code in this repository is licensed under the AGPL 3.0 unless otherwise noted.

Please see LICENSE.txt for details.

How To Contribute

Contributions are very welcome.

Please read How To Contribute for details.

Even though they were written with edx-platform in mind, the guidelines should be followed for Open edX code in general.

PR description template should be automatically applied if you are sending PR from github interface; otherwise you can find it it at PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md

Issue report template should be automatically applied if you are sending it from github UI as well; otherwise you can find it at ISSUE_TEMPLATE.md

Reporting Security Issues

Please do not report security issues in public. Please email help@opencraft.com.

Getting Help

Have a question about this repository, or about Open edX in general? Please refer to this list of resources if you need any assistance.

Change Log

Unreleased

[2.2.1] - 2020-06-05

  • Fix handling of invalid keys.

[2.1.3] - 2020-05-08

  • Fix all option in reaggregate_course.

[2.1.1] - 2020-04-20

  • Pass user.username to Celery task instead of user.

  • Convert course_key string to CourseKey in reaggregate_course.

[2.1.0] - 2020-04-17

  • Add locking mechanism to batch operations.

  • Replace course_key with course in reaggregate_course management command.

[2.0.1] - 2020-04-17

  • Convert course_key to string before sending it to Celery task.

[1.0.0] - 2018-01-04

  • First release on PyPI.

  • On-demand asynchronous aggregation of xblock completion.

  • Provides an API to retrieve aggregations for one or many users, for one or many courses.

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