5. Pathways: The Boundary Between Pathway and Pathway Item

5. Pathways: The Boundary Between Pathway and Pathway Item#

Status#

Draft

Context#

A Pathway is a set of requirements that a learner works through to earn some larger achievement, such as a certificate. Each requirement is represented by a Pathway Item. We want to draw the boundary between these two concepts so that the Pathway level stays stable while the Item level - and especially the ways Items get fulfilled - can evolve.

Decisions#

  1. A Pathway holds an ordered list of Pathway Items. The order is author-defined and is the order in which Items are presented to learners. In the future, we plan to also support enforcing the order of completion.

  2. A Pathway Item has its own identity and lifecycle. An Item may be fulfilled by one thing today (e.g. passing a course) and by something else tomorrow (e.g. a competency attainment, or an admin override) without changing its identity - and therefore without changing the Pathway that contains it. How fulfillment is modeled is a separate decision (6. Pathways: Mapping Pathway Items to the Things That Fulfill Them).

  3. Pathway to Item relationships do not break new ground structurally. We already have precedent for modeling parent-child relations in openedx_content containers; Pathway/PathwayItem will not use Container directly, as they don’t need Container’s full complexity.

  4. Item completion and Pathway completion are separate concerns. An Item is complete or not, determined by its own fulfillment rules; the Pathway’s completion is computed from Item completion.

  5. In the MVP, Pathway completion is not configurable: a Pathway is complete when all of its Items are complete. Because every Item is fulfilled by passing a course (6. Pathways: Mapping Pathway Items to the Things That Fulfill Them), this means the learner has passed every course in the Pathway, with grade and passed/failed state read directly from each course. Configurable criteria (e.g. “complete 4 of these 5 Items”) are expected in later iterations, and the intent is for them to be expressed in terms of Item completion rather than the Pathway-specific definition of what fulfills each Item.

  6. The Item completion contract is deliberately minimal for now - complete or not. It can be extended later to carry grades or other metadata, if more complex Pathway-level criteria or learner-facing displays need it.

Pathway, Pathway Items, and the fulfillment boundary

Consequences#

  • New ways of fulfilling Items can be introduced without restructuring Pathways or rewriting how Pathway completion is computed.

  • Learner-facing progress (“3 of 6 Items complete”) is computed from Item completion, so it also remains stable across such changes.

  • Interventions like admin overrides act on Item completion and are automatically respected by Pathway completion.

  • Extending the Item completion contract beyond a yes/no is an additive change, so nothing here has to be revisited to do it.