Courses:

Goal: Move to one type of learning experience (called a "course", but combining features that are currently included in "courses" or "challenges")

Current differences:

• Display / Design / UX
  • Location of edit buttons
  • Task list and discussion
• Participant Administration / Management
  • Permissions to remove yourself
  • Permissions to remove users if you are an organizer
• Sign up question & process
  • Courses: allow sign-up process
  • Challenges: no sign-up necessary
• Two types of users: Followers, Participants
  • Courses: followers, participants
  • Challenges: only participants
• Display of Author
  • Challenges doesn't display author
• Status
  • Courses: support moderated signup and closed signup in addition to test, under development, not listed, archived
  • Challenges: test, under development, not listed, archived
• Duration & Dates
  • Challenge: shows time estimated to complete
  • Course: start and end dates
• Badges
  • There is a confusing amount of different badge types (community, skill, completion)
  • Challenges: Allow completion badges (Completion badges not possible for courses)
  • Courses: Applicable badges not being displayed
• Completion
  • Challenges: Allow tasks to be marked as complete (leading to the whole challenge being complete)
  • Courses: No way to track task / course completion

The UniCourse (Unified - everything is called courses)
[features in brackets need more discussion and might be included in later releases]

• One consistent layout across all courses (regardless of options selected)
• Content
  • Ordered list of pages
  • 1 level of pages
  • No specified term (not "task", "chapter" or "module")
  • No automatic numbering
  • Page:
    • Page title
    • Page content (rich media)
    • Discussion
• Discussion (keeping disqus in mind)
  • per page - everyone is notified
  • per course - everyone is notified
• Course term
  • Fixed term (start on date X)
  • Rolling term (no start/stop date)
• Signup
  • Open (anyone can join)
  • [Moderated] (anyone can request to be added)
    • does request include question and response?
  • Closed (only the moderator can add users, nobody can request to join)
• Creation process (course status)
  • Draft
    • The initial course has been created, and the course creator builds the content
    • Does not show up in list of courses
    • Signup Closed (moderator can manually add other co-creators)
  • Active
    • Course shows up in lists of courses
    • Signup can be open, moderatod, or closed
  • Archived
    • Does not show up in list of courses
    • Signup Closed (moderator can manually add other co-creators)
• User management
  • Types of users
    • Organizer
    • Learner
    • [Additional user type that can monitor activity / follow]
  • Organizer can add / remove anyone
  • Anyone can leave
    • Except for the last organizer
  • Organizer can give other users organizer privileges
• Course homepage:
  • More similar to current challenges (than to courses)
  • Display all organizers
  • Display list of pages
  • No activity stream
• Completion [and progress]
  • Only moderators can mark that a user completed a course
  • [Completion can be marked by peer review]
  • [Users can track progress]
• Badges
  • Completion badges are awarded by moderator
  • [Completion badges are awarded through peer review without requiring moderator input]
• Privacy
  • Public - everything is open and visible
  • [Private - course interaction is only visible to members]
• [Review]
  • [Users can leave comments/reviews on the course itself]
• [Activity Stream]

Some notes/questions:

• DU: Schedule -> other that course term, should a schedule exist? - No
• DU: Should we keep links? - No
• DU: Should we keep short and long description?
  • Just plug and about page
• DU: current lifecycle is draft -> published -> archived, 
  • Should we allow archiving draft courses?
  • Should we allow published -> draft?
  • Should we automatically send notifications when publishing a course or should it be something explicitly done by a course organizer?
• DU: would be nice to display: "This course started on the X and Y people signed up for the course. Z people have completed it so far!"