gradebook

Please tag @edx/educator-neem on any PRs or issues.

Introduction

The front-end of our editable Gradebook feature.

What does this offer over the legacy gradebook?

The micro-frontend offers a great deal more granularity when searching for problems, an easy interface for editing grades, an audit trail for seeing who edited what grade and what reason they gave (if any) for doing so.

UsageProblems can be filtered by student as in the traditional gradebook, but can also be filtered by scores to see who scored within a certain range, and by assignment types (note: Not problem types, but categories like ‘Exams’ or ‘Homework’).

What does the legacy gradebook offer that this project does not?

This project does not (yet, at least) create any graphs, which the traditional gradebook does. It also does not give quick links to the problems for the instructor to visit. It expects the instructor to be familiar with the problems they are grading and which unit they refer to.

The gradebook is expected to be much more performant for larger numbers of students as well. The Instructor Dashboard link for the legacy gradebook reports that "this feature is available only to courses with a small number of enrolled learners." However, this project comes with no such warning.

Who should not change to this gradebook?

Groups whose instructors need not ever manually override grades do not need this project, but may not be any worse off depending on their needs. Instructors that expect to review grades infrequently enough that not having a direct link to the problem in question will have a worse UX than the legacy gradebook provides. Instructors that rely on the graphs generated by the current gradebook might find the lack of autogenerated graphs to be frustrating.

Installation

To install gradebook into your project:

npm i --save @edx/frontend-app-gradebook

Running the UI Standalone

To install the project please refer to the edX Developer Stack instructions.

The web application runs on port 1994, so when you go to http://localhost:1994/course-v1:edX+DemoX+Demo_Course you should see the UI (assuming you have such a Demo Course in your devstack). Note that you always have to provide a course id to actually see a gradebook.

If you don't, you can see the log messages for the docker container by executing make gradebook-logs in the devstack directory.

Note that starting the container executes the npm run start script which will hot-reload JavaScript and Sass files changes, so you should (:crossed_fingers:) not need to do anything (other than wait) when making changes.

Configuring for local use in edx-platform

Assuming you've got the UI running at http://localhost:1994, you can configure the LMS in edx-platform to point to your local gradebook from the instructor dashboard by putting this settings in lms/env/private.py:

WRITABLE_GRADEBOOK_URL = 'http://localhost:1994'

There are also several edx-platform waffle and feature flags you'll have to enable from the Django admin:

1. Grades > Persistent grades enabled flag. Add this flag if it doesn't exist, check the enabled and enabled for all courses boxes.

2. Waffle > Switches. Add the grades.assume_zero_grade_if_absent switch and make it active.

3. Waffle_utils > Waffle flag course overrides. You want to activate this flag for any course in which you'd like to enable the gradebook. Add a course override flag using a course id and the flag name grades.writable_gradebook. Make sure to check the enabled box. Alternatively, you could add this as a regular waffle flag to enable the gradebook for all courses.

NOTE: IF the above flags are not configured correctly, the gradebook may appear to work, but will return bogus numbers for grades. If your gradebook isn't accepting your changes, or the changes aren't resulting in sane, recalculated grade values, verify you've set all flags correctly.

Running tests

1. Assuming that you're operating in the context of the edX devstack, run gradebook-shell from your devstack directory. This will start a bash shell inside your running gradebook container.
2. Run make test (which executes npm run test). This will run all of the gradebook tests.

Directory Structure

• config
  • Directory for webpack configurations
• public
  • Entry point for the single-page application - gradebook has a single index.html file
• src
  • components
    • Directory for presentational React components
  • containers
    • Directory for container React components
  • data
    • actions
      • Directory for Redux action creators
    • constants
    • reducers
      • Directory for Redux reducers

Authentication with backend API services

See the @edx/frontend-auth repo for information about securing routes in your application that require user authentication.