The Schedules app allows course teams to automatically email learners in self-paced courses. The emails are designed to keep learners engaged with a course's content. Learners receive these messages at important milestones throughout a course.

With Schedules, the author of a self-paced course opts learners into one of two "Schedule Experiences". Learners either receive Weekly Course Highlight Messages, or a combination of Recurring Nudges and Upgrade Reminders.

The app can send all 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 nudges three days and ten days after a learner enrolls in a course.

Upgrade Reminders ask learners to purchase their course's "Verified" certificate. The reminders are sent two days from their course's upgrade deadline, or two days from the course's end date. Whichever date occurs sooner.

Weekly Course Highlight Messages tell learners what to look forward to in the coming week of a course. Course authors provide "section highlights" when authoring a course in Studio. The app generates emails with these section highlights listed in the body of the message.

The app introduces the Schedule object to the edX codebase. Learners receive Schedules when they enroll in self-paced courses. With Schedules, the app determines when to send particular messages. It assumes a steady rate of progress through course materials. It determines the cadence of its messaging through a course's "Schedule Experience".

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>'

Configuring Schedule Creation

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

ScheduleConfig

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.
hold_back_ratio: ratio of all new Course Enrollments that should NOT have a Schedule created.

Roll-out Waffle Flag

There is one roll-out related course waffle flag that we plan to delete called schedules.create_schedules_for_course, which, if the ScheduleConfig.create_schedules is disabled, will enable schedule creation on a per-course basis.

Self-paced Configuration

Schedules will only be created for a course if it is self-paced. A course can be configured to be self-paced by going to <studio_url>/admin/self_paced/selfpacedconfiguration/ and adding 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.

Configuring Upgrade Deadline on Schedule

The upgrade reminder message type depends on there being a date in the upgrade_deadline field of the Schedule model. Up-sell messaging will also be added to the recurring nudge and course updates message types when an upgrade deadline date is present.

DynamicUpgradeDeadlineConfiguration models

In order to enable filling in the upgrade_deadline field of new Schedule models created, you must create and enable one of the following:

A DynamicUpgradeDeadlineConfiguration toggles the feature for all courses globally.
A OrgDynamicUpgradeDeadlineConfiguration toggles the feature for all courses in a particular organization.
A CourseDynamicUpgradeDeadlineConfiguration toggles the feature for a particular course.

The CourseDynamicUpgradeDeadlineConfiguration takes precedence over the OrgDynamicUpgradeDeadlineConfiguration which takes precedence over the global DynamicUpgradeDeadlineConfiguration.

The "deadline days" field specifies how many days from the day of the learner's enrollment will be their soft upgrade deadline on the Schedule model.

Verified Course Mode

The upgrade_deadline will only be filled for a course if it has a verified course mode. To add a verified course mode to a course, go to <lms_url>/admin/course_modes/coursemode/ and add a course mode linked with the course with the "Mode" equal to "verified".

Configuring Email Sending

ScheduleConfig

The ScheduleConfig model at <lms_url>/admin/schedules/scheduleconfig/ also has fields which configure enqueueing and delivering emails per message type:

enqueue_*: allows sending email tasks of this message type to celery.
deliver_*: allows delivering emails through ACE for this message type.

Roll-out Waffle Flag

Another roll-out related course waffle flag that we plan to delete called schedules.send_updates_for_course will enable sending specifically the course updates email per-course.

Configuring Highlights UI in Studio

The button and modal on the course outline page that allows course authors to enter section highlights can be toggled globally by going to <lms_url>/admin/waffle/switch/ and adding an active switch called dynamic_pacing.studio_course_update.

This is a roll-out related waffle switch that we will eventually delete.

Configuring a Learner's Schedule

Emails will only be sent to learners who have Schedule start_dates or upgrade_deadlines and ScheduleExperience that match the criteria for the message type.

Recurring Nudge

Learners must have the ScheduleExperience type of "Recurring Nudge and Upgrade Reminder".
Their Schedule start_date must be 3 or 10 days before the current date.

Upgrade Reminder

Learners must have the ScheduleExperience type of "Recurring Nudge and Upgrade Reminder".
Their Schedule upgrade_deadline must be 2 days after the current date.

Course Update

Learners must have the ScheduleExperience type of "Course Updates".
Their Schedule start_date must be 7, 14, or any increment of 7 days up to 77 days before the current date.

Testing Changes

Running in Devstack

Ensure that you have correctly configured your LMS to send emails and that you have at least one user that matches the criteria of the message type you are testing.

By default your devstack should be configured to use the file_email ACE channel which saves the HTML emails to /path/to/your/devstack/src/ace_messages/*.html on your host (or /edx/src/ace_messages/ in your devstack docker container). Open the files in your browser to view the emails.

Litmus

Refer to the confluence page on How to test emails in a variety of clients.