How does the chat thread state machine work?
If you're curious, here is how the Grok chat thread state machine works. Don't worry - you don't need to know this in order to be a good tutor!
There can only ever be one chat thread per user per problem in a course. Each chat thread has a state to indicate whether the thread needs tutor attention. A chat thread needs attention if it's a newly created by the student or the student has not received a reply to their message. A tutor can reply to a thread or manually close the thread.
The full chat thread state machine is shown below:
The edge labels indicate the action required to transition from one state to another state. SR stands for “student replies”, TR stands for “tutor replies”, and TA stands for “tutor action”.
The tutor triage page lists all threads for the courses that the user is subscribed to live tutoring for, excluding threads in the CLOSED state, and excluding REPLIED threads for which the user has since solved the problem.
When a student solves a problem, the chat thread on the triage page will be marked with “solved”, giving the tutors some additional information when prioritising how to reply to pending threads. Solving a problem does not change the state that a chat thread is in however; tutors will need to either manually close or reply to any UNREPLIED threads to stop them from appearing in the list of actionable chat threads on the triage page.
The most common use case is: a student starts a chat thread with the tutoring team when they are having trouble with a particular problem (STUDENT NEW). The chat thread then appears on the tutor triage page. When a tutor accepts a chat thread, they will reply to the questions that the student asked, causing it to transition to the REPLIED state. The conversation might then go back and forth a couple of times, causing the chat thread to alternate between the UNREPLIEDand REPLIED states.
In addition to the above states, a chat thread can move from any state into the LOCKED state by action of a tutor. In the LOCKED state, students cannot send any further chat messages. The main purpose of this state is to stop problematic and/or abusive students from spamming the tutors. A tutor can unlock a LOCKED chat thread, and the act of doing so moves it into the CLOSED state.
The TUTOR NEW state is used when a tutor wants to initiate a chat thread with a student. The primary use case case for this is when a tutor identifies a student that appears to be struggling (using the Strugging Students page mode), and wants to send them an encouraging message.