Expand all / Collapse all toggle should reflect the actual section state in Course Outline

[amnausman2002]

Type of Request

Fast Track Change (small, low-risk improvements)

Feature Description

TL;DR

The Expand all / Collapse all button only updates its label when the button itself is clicked. When a user expands or collapses sections individually, the label stops matching the real state of the page — e.g. every section is collapsed but the button still reads "Collapse all."

Proposal: the toggle should always reflect the current aggregate state of the sections, not just the last button click. This is a interaction design change, not a visual design one.

Current behavior

1. Click Collapse all → all sections collapse and the button flips to Expand all (and vice versa).
2. If you then expand/collapse sections one at a time, the button label does not update.
3. You can end up with every section collapsed while the button still says "Collapse all" (or everything expanded while it still says "Expand all"). The label tracks the last button click, not the actual state.

Expected behavior

The label should always describe the action available for the current state, and update live as the user toggles individual sections:

• All sections expanded → button reads Collapse all
• Otherwise → button reads Expand all

Edge case: mixed state

When some sections are expanded and some collapsed, recommend defaulting to the current state — i.e. only show "Collapse all" if "Collapse all" was the state the user chose initially.

Scope

Small, low-risk. Label logic bound to section-level expand/collapse state.

References

• Screenshot: all sections collapsed, button still reads "Collapse all"
• Screenshot: all sections expanded, button still reads "Expand all"

Link to Product Proposal

No response

Status

New

Proposed By

Nurture at Arbisoft

[github-actions]

Thanks for your submission, @openedx/openedx-product-managers will review shortly.

[ali-hugo]

@amnausman2002 Thanks for working on this, and for sharing it with the Design Working Group. :)

What you've proposed makes sense to me, and I can't think of a better approach from a UX perspective. Thanks for making this improvement!

[sdaitzman]

Thanks @amnausman2002, this looks great! After some discussion at the Design WG, this looks great to ship as-is.

We discussed some alternate state machine options, and it may make sense to revisit those, but this is already an improvement to user experience. Pasting some of that discussion here for reference if this thread is revisited:

One suggested alternate logic to compare to:

Default state "collapse all"
If all sections are collapsed: always show "expand all"
If all sections are expanded, always show "collapse all"
No change in state when collapsing or expanding a subset of items with uneven state in outline