Content Delivery
Course Viewer
The image to the right represents a draft of the UX & layout of the view learners will see when consuming content. This draft reflects directional thinking around the UI/UX for the experience from within a course context with the outline expanded. We are actively working on designs around progress tracking and indicating where there required elements to be completed.
Video
Video will be an important component of the platform. For the initial releases, we are not planning any novel functionality from what is standard across most video players today. Instead, we are focusing on taking the right technological approach to video hosting and the video player to enable future innovation in this field, knowing that things like social annotations and in-player interactive activities will be functionality that we will want to support in the future.
Shared Reflection
A shared reflection is an open-response question where a learner's answer is shared with others. The learner, however, can only see others' responses after their answer is submitted. This teaching element is one of the most frequently used interactive elements on the Harvard Business School Online platform and is responsible for much of that platform's success in fostering rich exchanges among learners.
For a view into how this teaching element works on the HBSO platform, please see the video to the right (note that the video reflects an administrative view of the platform, so the content is not as rich as in a real course).
Please follow this link to view a mockup of ideas that we are considering for how shared reflections might work on the new platform within the context of other teaching elements, like polls and multiple-choice questions, all with a mobile-first design.
Multiple Choice
We are making incremental progress on multiple choice questions, making it easy to intermingle text and other rich media with answer choices, as well as add contextual explanations for each choice and give authors flexibility in determining when to display that contextual help.
Peer Help
Peer help is a multi-function application within the LXP. To the right is an example of how peer help is currently implemented on HBSO. Learners have the ability to ask different kinds of questions anywhere in the course, and their peers can both answer and explore the answers.
For the LXP, the first implementation of peer help will draw on what has worked with peer help for HBSO and focus on providing a mobile-friendly experience that also facilities easy navigation and exploration of peer responses. For future releases, we are still in the design and planning stage on possible functionality, such as bringing the interactive peer help functionality to in-line annotations.
Short-Form Content
The vision for short-form content is to create modular online learning experiences that leverage the efforts of faculty in classrooms, create new and transformative opportunities for residential and online learners, and generate new ways for faculty to connect with learners everywhere. There are a myriad of potential use cases and modes within which short-form content may be developed and distributed via the LXP. We are currently exploring those various options and are formulating a short-form learning experiences strategy. If you are also working on short-form related matters and would like to connect, please contact Sarah Grafman (sarah_grafman@harvard.edu), who is the Director of Short-Form Content at VPAL.
Discussion Forums
Discussion forum functionality is an area of deep interest for the LXP project. We have learned a great deal from experiences across edX as well as through the many Harvard programs that use online discussion tools for residential, blended, and fully online courses. From tools like Piazza to Yellowdig to Slack to Discourse, we have seen various approaches to foster meaningful discussion. We have also observed and analyzed how peer institutions and commercial education products have approached discussion forums. As such, we are acutely aware of the many opportunities and risks involved in adopting any discussion approach or tool.
With that backdrop in mind, we are approaching discussion functionality cautiously. Not only do we want to invest in a sustainable and dynamically adaptable solution, but we also only want to do so when we are confident that we have the necessary human support - both administratively and substantively - to accomplish the goals of the discussion functionality. In short, we understand that building or picking a particular technology will not in of itself foster a successful discussion forum. Rather, we must be very intentional around the particular learning goals of the discussion format and work backward from there, recognizing that we may not settle on a single solution for all scenarios.
LTI
LTI is a standard that enables communication between one learning system and another. We aim to support the latest version of LTI (currently 1.3). Through LTI we will enable a diversity of teaching elements to be used within the LXP. Currently, our primary focus is not on LTI per se, but rather interrogating the limits of LTI. As we strive to create a platform that empowers units across Harvard and beyond to innovate in teaching and learning, we want to understand the limits of current standards like LTI to better evaluate if there are other technological approaches that we should be pursuing in addition to LTI to enable innovation and sustainability around the development of custom teaching elements while also providing the best possible experience for learners.