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The Mechanical MOOC is a lightweight system for running massive open online courses (MOOCs).
All communication happens via email. Users are grouped and can communicate within their groups. Course organizer can send emails to all users or groups. Course organizer send periodic instructions to groups.
- Simple - the web is the platform
- User friendly signup
- Handle big signup spikes
- Low cost
- Cloud hosted
- Some technical knowledge ok for set up
- Signup
- Visit domain.org -> Fill in form & submit -> redirect to success page & get welcome email
- Signup associated with sequence currently open for signup
- User added to global list for sequence.
- User removed from all unsubscribe lists on mailgun
- Grouping users
- manual process
- set group size (ex. 10)
- group every X people in list sorted by timezone
- consider bus-is-full model
- groups are synced to mailgun
- Managing and sending email
- rich text editor to author emails
- can send test email while composing email
- can edit/delete unsent emails
- email sent to
- all users in a sequence (no reply possible to email)
- all groups in a sequence (reply routed to other members in group)
- send email immediately from list of emails
- schedule email to be sent at a later time (UTC time is used for scheduling)
- Opt-out of course
- link to unsubscribe from sequence or everything in all emails
- when unsubscribing completely
- user removed from general sequence mailing list
- user removed from any groups they are part of
- signup marked as unsubscribed
- when unsubscribing from current sequence
- user removed from general sequence mailing list
- user removed from all groups they are part of
- user added to general mailing list for next sequence
Users
- timezone
- invite code
- answers to sign up questions
- sign up date
- update date
- unsubscribe date
- sequence subscribed for
Groups
- user list
- creation date
- email address for mailing list
- sequence
Factors to take into account:
- Group size(s)
- Timezone
- Answers to sign up questions
- Number of signups
- Number of emails opened
- Number of emails sent per group
- Email opens
- Group activity
- Unsubscribes
- Aggregated per group & per week/email
/ - promo page (video) and sign up form
/signup - form data posted here
/success - shown to user after signing up
/invite/ - page that prompts user to join the invitee or signup separately
/login - login for course organizers
/mail/compose - author email to send to groups
/mail/save - save authored email
/mail/ - view email to edit
/mail/<email_id>/send - send email
/mail/list - view all emails
The typical lifecycle for a MOOC looks like this:
Sign up -> emails sent to all signed up users -> sign up closes -> users added to small groups -> emails sent to groups or all signed up users