docs: ADR instructor dashboard rest api architecture

[wgu-jesse-stewart]

Summary

Add Architecture Decision Record (ADR) documenting the unified REST API architecture for the Instructor Dashboard, including comprehensive mapping of 90 endpoints across 12 functional domains with service dependencies and migration status.

Details

This ADR captures the architectural design for consolidating instructor dashboard functionality into a modern, RESTful API structure and serves as the technical foundation for migrating the Instructor Dashboard from legacy Django views to a modern API-first architecture, enabling better frontend/backend separation and improved maintainability.

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Codecov Report

✅ All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests.
✅ Project coverage is 36.36%. Comparing base (5b0d465) to head (555dd32).
⚠️ Report is 5 commits behind head on main.

Additional details and impacted files

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+ Coverage   0.00%   36.36%   +36.36%     
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[sarina]

Hey @feanil could you take a look here and see if we're moving in the right direction? If you're crunched for release time letting us know ~when you could take a look would be helpful. 🙇🏻‍♀️

[wgu-taylor-payne]

Overall I think this is well laid out and organized. I don't have a good grasp on the data/models involved, which obviously inform the design, but here are some things to consider:

[wgu-taylor-payne]

Also, the commit for this ADR should be docs rather than feat (ref).

[feanil]

Left some in-line comments, one thing missing from this set of tables is the intent of each of the verbs. It's hard to infer what would happen when an endpoint is called with a verb if there is not already an equivalent endpoint.

[wgu-jesse-stewart]

@wgu-taylor-payne

Overall I think this is well laid out and organized. I don't have a good grasp on the data/models involved, which obviously inform the design, but here are some things to consider:

@feanil

Left some in-line comments, one thing missing from this set of tables is the intent of each of the verbs. It's hard to infer what would happen when an endpoint is called with a verb if there is not already an equivalent endpoint.

thank you for the feedback - I have updated the docs to address each comment

[bradenmacdonald]

Was there some decision to call these "students" instead of "learners"? The term "learner" has always been preferred in the past, and that seems like a major change!

[sarina]

We should still be using "Learner" and not "Student".

[wgu-jesse-stewart]

Okay, I'll keep that in mind. Are we renaming the auth service or will all references to student remain in the code base? https://github.com/WGU-Open-edX/edx-platform/tree/master/common/djangoapps/student or any of the existing APIs that use the student naming convention?

[bradenmacdonald]

Hmm, you're right that there's a lot of student in the codebase, though it's not user-facing. More than I remembered in fact :p

I do see this as an opportunity to align the backend names with the frontend names. It's like our ongoing effort in Authoring MFE to call things "units", "subsections" and "sections" (what users see) instead of "verticals", "sequentials", and "chapters". Whenever we add large new API surfaces, it's an opportunity to handle naming more consistently. So I think it's best to use "learner" here since that's what it will say in the UI.

[bradenmacdonald]

Following up on my previous comment, I think it would be good to replace all the /students/ in the URLs here with /learners/ while we have the option, since it's a new API. Then the developer terminology is more in line with the user/operator terminology.

[mphilbrick211]

Hi @wgu-jesse-stewart! Is this still in progress?