[Pull Request] A feature flag to disable date tab.

[farhaanbukhsh]

1. Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

2. What new feature or functionality would you like to request?

There is no way to disable tabs on the course page

We need a way to disable individual Tabs. We started this with 'Dates Tab', this feature flag helps to hide 'Dates Tab' throughout the instance. For this, we have worked on a PR:

openedx/edx-platform#34511

3. What product area does this feature affect?

Courseware

4. Please describe the scope of the feature

This affects the tabs that appear on the courseware LMS page.

5. Please describe why you see a need for this feature

This feature flag helps to customize the instance and helps to convey the information more realistically.

6. Please describe the potential impact and/or value of this feature

As mentioned above it helps in customizing the instance.

7. Please provide 2-3 use cases and/or user stories in support of this feature

Helps to hide the dates since there are times when it is not relevant to the organization using it.

8. Any additional information you'd like to provide?

No response

[github-actions]

Thanks for your submission, @openedx/openedx-product-managers will review shortly.

[marcotuts]

Site Level Feature Flag: Not Recommended for Merge
I don't know how commonly an instance-wide Dates tab disabling would be, so I don't know (as with the other Progress Tab customization PR) if this should be merged upstream as a feature flag versus just a site-level front-end slot customization done for a specific client.

This is not a strong stance to be clear, but I don't know if we expect this will be commonly used at the site level.

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Course Level Pages & Resources Card + Disable Option: Recommended for Merge (?!?)
Separately, I did wonder if Dates should be added to the Pages & Resources view of Studio, since both Discussions and Progress are visible here and can be enabled + disabled from this view. (Shown below in the attachment). I don't know what kinds of settings we would want to expose in the Dates area if any, but perhaps like the progress page it is rather empty other than being able to be enabled / disabled.

Is it strange that the case for making this a site-level feature flag seems weak, but that the experience completeness + customization balance of having Dates be added for each course to decide whether they want to turn it off (which would be VERY infrequently used, as with turning off the progress page) is somehow a more compelling case in my mind?

It feels a bit strange to me, but somehow I think if I'd seen this as a proposal to "Match Dates page customization for Courses" and enable similar functionality as Progress / Discussion / Wiki / Textbooks / Static Pages, it would have been a thumbs up from me.

Thanks for the proposal @farhaanbukhsh - Hopefully others chime in and share their thoughts as well.

[farhaanbukhsh]

Is it strange that the case for making this a site-level feature flag seems weak, but that the experience completeness + customization balance of having Dates be added for each course to decide whether they want to turn it off (which would be VERY infrequently used, as with turning off the progress page) is somehow a more compelling case in my mind?

Actually @marcotuts you are right on this part because intuitively even I thought that it makes more sense for the course to have a setting where we can turn the date tab on and off and it was very human to think that. But hear me out on this the argument is if I want to disable a date tab on an instance I would want that behavior for all the courses in a uniform fashion whereas having a date tab for some courses while not having one on another will create a dissonance in the learners.

Now, this might not be true for wiki, discussion or pages since they have functionality and actions attached to them while date is just a way of conveying information.

I am open to suggestions and better way of taking this approach here.

Thanks a lot for the quick revert @marcotuts

[marcotuts]

Hi @farhaanbukhsh, the inconsistency you highlight when you enable/disable course tabs within an instance is absolutely an issue, but at edX we found organizations that needed / (or felt they needed) this level of control even if it left learners with not a consistent cross-course experience.

This is somewhat related to the example I mentioned in the Progress controls PR (quote excerpts is below)- #389

I could imagine an instance having 2-3 types of courses: standard, certification, and capstone. This example course 'type' isn't reflected by an existing setting but in this hypothetical you might have a single project submission in the capstone, and a practice test or two plus a final exam in the certification course type. Across these course 'types' you could imagine wanting to hide different areas of the progress page that feel less relevant, or (as I saw in another pull request - hide the dates tab?).

In other words perhaps there are mixes of courses where you'd like to hide larger areas of the course but keep them enabled elsewhere, but it still doesn't strike me as common a need to justify upstreaming the more I consider this and how this pattern would be echoed into other parts of the course tools / mobile apps / course-level apps.

Instance Level - It should be possible to more easily control which tabs are shown / hidden by default in my course, and which areas of the Pages & Resources view should be hidden. This won't be common but it allows for the control of hiding all Dates / Progress / Discussion tabs or any combination of these at the instance level. This is most like the PR proposal currently, though I wonder if we should consider what it would look like to configure any of the course tabs / pages & resources areas consistently instead of just 1 feature flag for dates. Do any of the other tabs have feature flags or configuration options today?

Course Level - How common should the need be to be able to disable a page at the course level? The Pages & Resources view / UX experience doesn't place a value judgment on whether you should do this but it does show the controls for Discussion, Wiki, Progress, but it is missing Dates currently. FWIW I'm not sure that I agree that the current pages have functionality/actions attached to them and Dates does not. Dates let you see / action on verification/upgrade / assignment deadlines the same way that the progress page MOSTLY conveys information and also has actions like clicking through to assignments, upgrading, etc. (Discussions + Wiki are for sure very different and have lots of interactivity) This isn't necessarily in scope for this PR but still worth considering at some future point in time.

[farhaanbukhsh]

Hey @marcotuts sorry for the late reply.

Do any of the other tabs have feature flags or configuration options today?

Most of them do for example the discussion tab doesn't show up unless and until we have enabled the plugin, the same is true for Page and Resources. The tab bar that we have is quite dynamic with what it can have hence I think it will be a good contribution to do the same with Date. By default the Date tab is visible and if we want we can toggle it to false on an instance level.

[farhaanbukhsh]

Hey @jmakowski1123 @marcotuts any updates here?

[farhaanbukhsh]

Hello folks :) Are there any updates on this?

[farhaanbukhsh]

Hey @marcotuts @jmakowski1123 can we finalize this? Please let us know if you have any feedback.

[pdpinch]

What's your user story for hiding the dates tab @farhaanbukhsh?

We have one, but it might lead to a different approach, more like @marcotuts proposal.

We have courses that are "archived" but perpetually open. We want to encourage users to drop in at any time to access the materials, but discussions are closed and there's no certificates. For these courses, all the UI elements about dates -- not just the dates tab -- are distracting and confusing and lead to helpdesk tickets.

Disabling the dates tab would be helpful, but we'd actually like to turn off more dates UI.

There are, of course, other ways to do what I'm thinking of. I don't bring this up to hijack your proposal, but just to move towards a better articulation of the product goal.

[Cup0fCoffee]

@pdpinch Chiming in on behalf of @farhaanbukhsh in regards to the user story.

One of our clients reached out to us with the following request:

We would like to hide the course date tab as all our courses are currently asynchronous with rolling enrollment and no official start date

In other words, they would like to like a way to "hide date tab for all courses". That is why in the upstream PR -openedx/edx-platform#34511 - we went with the option of introducing a feature flag. All other types of flags would only allow hiding by course or org (afaik). But we are open to a compromise.

We dismissed the following options:

• Making dates tab togglable, like other tabs. - Didn't fit our user story, because that would make course authors remember to do it for all courses, i.e. inconvenient.
• Adding a CourseWaffleFlag for toggling the visibility of dates tab. - Isn't global enough. Afaik, the most global you can do with that is per organization.

I guess it could also be a SiteConfig option, but afaik, aside from MFE_CONFIG, it's being deprecated for all other stuff.

I wonder if we've overlooked anything else.

I understand that downsides of our proposed option, i.e. not flexible (global, can't be overridden), is not aligned with how other tabs work.

Disabling the dates tab would be helpful, but we'd actually like to turn off more dates UI.

This is also aligns with the requests that we've been receiving, e.g. hiding things like this:

But it's beyond the scope of this proposal.

[farhaanbukhsh]

Hi @pdpinch

There are, of course, other ways to do what I'm thinking of. I don't bring this up to hijack your proposal, but just to move towards a better articulation of the product goal.

I am happy that you pitched in, thank you 😄

I hope @Cup0fCoffee has given you the user story. I am hoping we could come with a way maybe that can benefit everyone.

[jmakowski1123]

With this approach:

Making dates tab togglable, like other tabs. - Didn't fit our user story, because that would make course authors remember to do it for all courses, i.e. inconvenient.

If the dates tab is togglable, is it possible to have a bulk "select all courses" option, to get around the inconvenience of having to choose course by course?