completion.enable_completion_tracking waffle flag disablement doesn't remove the progress tracking UI

[throwaway-a]

In this thread Braden MacDonald said that the completion.enable_completion_tracking waffle flag should disable the progress tracking UI. I expected it to disable the auto-populating green checkmarks. But that has not been my experience since I upgraded to Nutmeg. This is a regression from the Lilac behavior.

Braden also said "Technically the Waffle flag should simply determine whether or not completion is tracked in the database, not whether or not the green checks are displayed to learners, but I think the same setting was historically used for both."

I would like to request that the Lilac behavior is returned, so that I can have students track their own progress manually via completion xblocks.

[bradenmacdonald]

Just to clarify, I'm not sure if the waffle flag should disable the UI. It probably makes more sense to have a separate configuration to toggle the UI (e.g. an environment variable for the Learning MFE). Because I can imagine cases where people want the data to be tracked in the backend but not shown in the frontend. But certainly it's not possible to show the UI if the data isn't there, so the "UI" toggle could default to the value of the waffle flag.

[throwaway-a]

That is a good point. I wouldn't mind having the data tracked behind the scenes so I can query it, but I don't want it showing up for students, because it tends to confuse them when they don't understand how to get a completion mark on a page.

[throwaway-a]

Does anyone know where the actual icons for the grayed out circles with checkmarks are, so that I can replace them with 1 pixel empty images? That would at least let me hack my local instance to stop showing these to students, and allow me to upgrade my server to Olive. (This UI is currently a blocking change for me. I can't confuse students like this.)

[throwaway-a]

Just to put a finer-point on it, here is what students see due to the inability to hide this UI:

They will always see a 0% course completion on their Progress page, even if the grade is non-0%. This is obviously confusing to students, and thus is not something we can ship. We're stuck on Lilac until this is resolved.

The un-checkable checkmarks are bad, but they're not ship-blockers...

[pdpinch]

We don’t display this UI in our current Olive deployments, but I’m not sure what setting controls it. Do you have a setting for SHOW_PROGRESS_BAR <https://edx.readthedocs.io/projects/edx-platform-technical/en/latest/featuretoggles.html#featuretoggle-FEATURES%5B'SHOW_PROGRESS_BAR'%5D>?

…

On Feb 27, 2023, at 12:05 PM, throwaway-a ***@***.***> wrote: Just to put a finer-point on it, here is what students see due to the inability to hide this UI: <https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/77025740/221630712-71b09ada-9f0b-4669-9702-a8f2a2fdf815.png> They will always see a 0% course completion on their Progress page, even if the grade is non-0%. This is obviously confusing to students, and thus is not something we can ship. We're stuck on Lilac until this is resolved. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#245 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AADJALSC5E3MVCP7EKQUWL3WZTNF3ANCNFSM6AAAAAATWB5SDY>. You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.

[throwaway-a]

I certainly didn't manually set that with a tutor plugin or anything like that. And I don't get any hits for either of

grep -r SHOW_PROGRESS_BAR /home/ubuntu/.local/share/tutor/env/
grep SHOW_PROGRESS_BAR /home/ubuntu/.local/share/tutor/config.yml

So is there somewhere else I should look on a tutor Nutmeg install?

Also I'm not sure whether the "we" there is referring to your own organization, or the maintainers of Open edX? I checked the cloned-then-upgrade-to-Olive copy of my server and it displays the same UI as above on Olive.

[mariajgrimaldi]

@throwaway-a: I'll be testing some configurations. I'll let you know what works for me

[jalondonot]

Any update on this, @mariajgrimaldi?

[throwaway-a]

@mariajgrimaldi Since this slipped out of Olive.3 is this also not expected to be solved in Palm? (I wanted to upgrade to Palm before its released specifically to test this, since this is my upgrade-blocker.)

[mariajgrimaldi]

The progress tab can be turned off using the learning MFE using these changes: #278 (comment)
I already opened a PR and it's ready for review. Do you think that would be enough?

[throwaway-a]

If I'm understanding you correctly, and "progress tab can be turned off" means the entire "Progress" tab would disappear, then no, that wouldn't be helpful. Students need to be able to see their course progress, and find any units that they didn't complete. I just need the inaccurate and confusing "Course completion 0%" UI that I showed above to disappear, like it used to.

But I'm not sure if you meant that the fix in #278 turns off the entire Progress tab? Because the fix discussion in #278 seems to be suggesting that it's updating the code to correct the root cause error of an incorrect case in the truth check?

[throwaway-a]

@mariajgrimaldi I'm testing Palm, and the toggle doesn't seem to be hiding the erroneous 0% progress graph.

First, I would note that when I toggle this off and go to save, there is temporarily an error displayed, as shown below, before the dialog disappears.

Then it acts like it applied the change, and I see the below the next time I go into the gear icon:

I also see this under "Advanced Settings" for the course.

However, the students accounts still see this, so it seems that the change is not actually affecting the UI:

[mariajgrimaldi]

I opened an issue in the MFE repo: openedx/frontend-app-authoring#517

[mariajgrimaldi]

The latest update is found here: openedx/frontend-app-authoring#517 (comment)

[antoviaque]

@mariajgrimaldi I'm following up on some older items brought up in the core contributor sprints retro - I see that the linked issues are marked as closed/merged, is the current issue thus fixed now? Should the current ticket be closed?

[throwaway-a]

@antoviaque What's the best way to test this to confirm it's working as expected?

[antoviaque]

@throwaway-a I do not know - I'm not familiar with this task, I am just trying to figure out if it has been solved for those who reported it.

[throwaway-a]

@antoviaque @mariajgrimaldi I confirmed this is not fixed on Tutor 16.1.8 (latest v16) which is using Palm.4. This is insanely discouraging!

I set a class to have progress but not show the progress graph under Content -> Pages & Resources -> Progress:

I would note that it seems to very briefly show a "we couldn't apply your changes" error when you hit save.

And thus the students still see 0% completion, which means this is not fixed.

The students also continue to see un-checkable checkboxes that say "Incomplete" when they hover over them.

So until the 0% progress and uncheckable checkboxes are fixed, this is still regressed compared to Maple and this is still a blocker for upgrade (because it confuses students)

Per this ticket it seems like people only tested on devstack, not tutor, which AFAIK is the official correct way to install Open edX these days?

[throwaway-a]

I can further confirm this doesn't work with Tutor 17.0.2 which uses open-release/quince.2 😫

[arbrandes]

A fix was merged to master in October of 2023: openedx/frontend-app-learning#1194. This explains why it didn't make it into quince: it probably missed the cutoff date. For what it's worth, it'll definitely make it into Redwood.

(And if somebody opens a backport to Quince, I can try and give it some attention.)

[mariajgrimaldi]

I'll close this issue since it'll be available for redwood according to the PR merged back in October. Also, I tested it in the community nightly sandbox and it worked as described in the PR. Thank you all!