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.
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
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.
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.
You can install this XBlock's dependencies for development by performing:
make requirements
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 an 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 correctly.
- 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 prerequisites feature to better explain the learners why certain subsections will or will not be made available to them.
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
- Greater than
- Greater 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.
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.
- 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
