The Schedules app allows course teams to automatically email learners taking self-paced courses. The emails are designed to keep learners engaged with a course's content. The app sends them at important milestones in a learner's progression. The app sends three message types "out of the box":

Recurring Nudges
Upgrade Reminders
Weekly Course Highlight Messages

Recurring Nudges encourage learners to engage with self-paced courses at regular intervals. The app sends learners nudges three days, 10 days, and 19 days after they enroll in a self-paced course.

Upgrade Reminders signal learners to upgrade to a self-paced course's "Verified" track. They are sent 19 days from a learner's enrollment date, or two days from the course's end date.

Weekly Course Highlight Messages tell learners what to look forward to in a coming week of a course. The app generates messages with instructor-supplied "section highlights" in the body of the message.

The app measures a learner's progress with a "Schedule" Django object. The app assigns Schedules to learners and coordinates its messaging with their Schedules.

Glossary

Schedule Stores the day a learner enrolls in a course and the learner's "upgrade deadline"
Schedule Experience
Upgrade Deadline

The date before which a learner can purchase a verified certificate. A Schedule imposes a "soft" upgrade deadline 21 days from when a learner enrolled in a course. A self-paced course imposes a "hard" upgrade deadline that is the course-wide expiration date for upgrading on the course. A learner's Schedule will use whichever date is earlier.

Recurring Nudge
Upgrade Reminder
Course Update
Highlights
Resolver
Task

User-flow

When a user enrolls in a self-paced course and the necessary flags and configurations are enabled, a Schedule and ScheduleExperience is created for them. The Schedule has an upgrade deadline set for some number of days from the enrollment date.

Getting Started

These instructions assume you have already setup an Open edX instance or have a Running devstack. See the Open edX Developer's Guide for information on how to set those up.

Setting up edX Automated Communication Engine (A.C.E.)

The Schedule app relies on ACE, which requires a Sailthru back-end for sending emails. See the edx-ace documentation for instructions on setting up a Sailthru channel in ACE.

Django Settings

Edit the lms.env.json and add/change the following:

FEATURES = {
    'ENABLE_MKTG_SITE': True,
}
MKTG_URLS = {
    'ROOT': '<insert_lms_url_here>',
}
SOCIAL_MEDIA_FOOTER_URLS = {
    'tumblr': '<insert_tumblr_url_here>',
    'reddit': '<insert_reddit_url_here>',
    'twitter': '<insert_twitter_url_here>',
    'google_plus': '<insert_google_plus_url_here>',
    'youtube': '<insert_youtube_url_here>',
    'linkedin': '<insert_linkedin_url_here>',
    'meetup': '<insert_meetup_url_here>',
    'facebook': '<insert_facebook_url_here>',
}
MOBILE_STORE_URLS = {
    'google': '<insert_play_store_url_here>',
    'apple': '<insert_app_store_url_here>',
}
CONTACT_MAILING_ADDRESS = '<insert_physical_address_here>'
ACE_ENABLED_CHANNEL = ['sailthru_email']
ACE_ENABLED_POLICIES = ['bulk_email_optout']
ACE_CHANNEL_SAILTHRU_TEMPLATE_NAME = '<insert_sailthru_template_name_here>'

Configuration Models

Make sure a Site has been created at <lms_url>/admin/sites/site.

In the Django admin panel at <lms_url>/admin/schedules/scheduleconfig/ create a ScheduleConfig and link it to the Site. Make sure to enable all of the settings:

create_schedules: enables creating new Schedules when new Course Enrollments are created.
enqueue_*: allows sending email tasks of this message type to celery.
deliver_*: allows delivering emails through ACE for this message type.
hold_back_ratio: ratio of all new Course Enrollments that should NOT have a Schedule created.

If you are testing with a particular course, make sure that it is self-paced by going to <studio_url>/admin/self_paced/selfpacedconfiguration/ and add an enabled self paced config. Then, go to Studio settings for the course and change the Course Pacing value to "Self-Paced". Note that the Course Start Date has to be set to sometime in the future in order to change the Course Pacing.

Waffle Flags and Switches

Global

All waffle flags and switches can be created at <lms_url/admin/waffle/.

Org-level

Course-level

Schedule creation: schedules.create_schedules_for_course

Other Requirements

Testing Changes

Running in Devstack

The management command?

Outputting to File backend.

README.md

Dynamic Pacing Schedules