{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp04_retrieval_first_paired20_20260802","cell_id":"layer_decay_and_expiration_management__education_pedagogy","arm":"PROPOSAL_FIRST","candidate_id":"course-scaffold-lifecycle-registry","hypothesis_id":null,"version":0,"title":"Lifecycle Registry for Accumulated Course Scaffolds","problem":"Across repeated course offerings, instructors and instructional designers deposit hints, worked examples, rubrics, prerequisite refreshers, discussion prompts, accommodations, and corrective notes into copied course shells. These layers often remain active after the curriculum, assessment, learner cohort, or referenced resource changes. Students can therefore encounter obsolete or mutually inconsistent guidance, while instructors hesitate to remove old layers because some still support an assessment dependency, an approved accommodation, grade-review evidence, or reconstruction of a prior offering.","actors":["students","instructors","teaching assistants","instructional designers","accessibility and disability-services staff","curriculum leads","learning-management-system administrators"],"observable_state":"A course shell contains multiple generations of instructional-support artifacts with creation dates, last-validation dates, owners, learner visibility, and dependencies that are missing or inconsistent; older artifacts remain discoverable beside current guidance, duplicate or contradict newer artifacts, reference retired assessments or resources, or have no identified current use while still being published.","consequence":"Learners may act on superseded instructions or receive unintended levels of support, teaching staff spend time resolving contradictions, and indiscriminate cleanup can remove accessibility supports, assessment dependencies, or evidence needed to interpret prior instructional decisions.","affected_objective":"Keep learner-facing guidance current and interpretable while preserving required accessibility, assessment, review, and historical reconstruction paths.","intervention":"Create a lifecycle registry for instructional-support artifacts across successive course offerings. Assign each artifact an identity, owner, course-version provenance, lifecycle state, validation date, dependency links, retention class, and provisional expiry trigger. Surface suspected stale artifacts for human review; rank review priority using age, current access, contradiction, ownership, and reconstruction value; then route reviewed artifacts to refresh, active retention, unpublishing, archive, compaction, exception hold, or reversible quarantine. Require dependency and accessibility checks before removal, leave a supersession or deletion marker for surviving references, and periodically test that archived course layers can be restored and interpreted.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Sequential deposits","domain_realization":"Hints, exemplars, rubrics, prompts, accommodations, and corrective notes copied or added during successive course offerings."},{"archetype_element":"Age and deposition-order index","domain_realization":"Course-offering provenance, creation date, last revision, and last instructional validation for each support artifact."},{"archetype_element":"Stale layers masquerading as current","domain_realization":"Published guidance from an earlier syllabus or assessment remains visible without a superseded or expired label."},{"archetype_element":"Differentiated lifecycle states","domain_realization":"Draft, active, review-due, superseded, unpublished, archived, quarantined, and exception-held states replace the binary choice between published and deleted."},{"archetype_element":"Dependency and reconstruction protection","domain_realization":"Checks identify links from assessments, grade-review records, accessibility plans, prerequisite paths, and prior-offering reconstruction procedures."},{"archetype_element":"Preservation exceptions","domain_realization":"Named holds protect approved accommodations, contested-grade evidence, accreditation evidence, safety instructions, and historically necessary course records."},{"archetype_element":"Reversible and auditable disposition","domain_realization":"Unpublished artifacts enter a time-boxed quarantine, retain a decision record, and leave a marker pointing to a successor or archive location."},{"archetype_element":"Revalidation loop","domain_realization":"Owners periodically reconsider active artifacts, exception holds, expiry rules, and archive restorability when courses or assessments change."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"stale_layer_detection_dashboard","role":"Maintains the artifact inventory and surfaces published supports whose references, owners, assessments, or claims no longer match the current course context.","counterfactual_removal":"Without it, stale supports remain distributed and cleanup depends on staff remembering where prior layers were deposited."},{"mechanism_slug":"age_weighted_value_score","role":"Orders the human review queue using age-discounted instructional value plus access, contradiction risk, provenance, and reconstruction value; it does not authorize disposition.","counterfactual_removal":"Without it, reviewers face an undifferentiated inventory and may prioritize conspicuous artifacts rather than the strongest combinations of age, low use, and misleading content."},{"mechanism_slug":"retention_schedule","role":"Maps artifact classes to review periods, minimum retention, disposition options, and named accessibility, accreditation, grade-review, or legal holds.","counterfactual_removal":"Without it, different course teams apply inconsistent keep-or-remove rules and exceptions can become invisible or permanent."},{"mechanism_slug":"dependency_safe_delete_check","role":"Blocks removal until live inbound references from assessments, accommodations, grade-review records, and reconstruction paths have been checked.","counterfactual_removal":"Without it, an artifact judged pedagogically obsolete could still be removed while serving a load-bearing administrative or learner-support function."},{"mechanism_slug":"soft_delete_quarantine_window","role":"Separates unpublishing from destruction and provides a recoverable, audited grace period sized to the estimated impact of mistaken removal.","counterfactual_removal":"Without it, a classification or bulk-cleanup error becomes immediately irreversible."},{"mechanism_slug":"tombstone_or_deletion_marker","role":"Records that an artifact was intentionally retired and directs surviving references to its successor, archive, or explicit unavailable state.","counterfactual_removal":"Without it, staff cannot distinguish deliberate retirement from a missing artifact, and copied links may continue to imply that obsolete guidance is valid."},{"mechanism_slug":"archive_restore_test","role":"Periodically samples archived artifacts from different course generations and verifies retrieval, readability, provenance, and reconnection to the appropriate historical shell.","counterfactual_removal":"Without it, archived instructional history may appear preserved even when formats, permissions, or contextual links no longer permit reconstruction."},{"mechanism_slug":"time_to_live_ttl_policy","role":"Assigns new, explicitly temporary supports such as exam-week hints or transition notices a review-or-expire date at creation, with renewal requiring owner confirmation.","counterfactual_removal":"Without it, newly created temporary supports immediately begin the same indefinite accumulation cycle."}],"causal_chain":["Successive offerings deposit additional instructional-support artifacts into copied course environments.","The registry identifies each artifact and exposes its age, validation status, visibility, ownership, retention class, and dependencies.","Staleness signals and the age-weighted score place plausible high-risk or low-current-value artifacts into a bounded review queue without deleting them.","Authorized reviewers distinguish current supports from artifacts requiring refresh, supersession, archiving, exception protection, or retirement.","Dependency, accessibility, and hold checks block unsafe disposition and record why an artifact must remain available.","Approved retirements are first unpublished and quarantined, while markers redirect surviving references and preserve decision lineage.","Archived materials move out of the active learner-facing layer but remain reconstructable through tested restore procedures.","Periodic revalidation prevents temporary holds, active labels, and expiry assumptions from silently becoming permanent.","The active course layer becomes more bounded and interpretable while protected historical and learner-support functions remain recoverable."],"baseline":"Course teams commonly copy the previous course shell, add or edit supports as needs arise, and conduct occasional manual cleanup near the start of a term. Current items may be distinguished through naming conventions or folders, but lifecycle states, dependency checks, exception reviews, quarantine, and restore tests are not integrated into one artifact-level process.","nearest_rivals":["A pre-term manual content audit in which an instructor opens modules and removes visibly outdated materials.","Maintaining one canonical current course shell and rebuilding each offering from that template.","Ordinary document version history that preserves revisions but does not govern which instructional layers remain learner-visible or when they should expire."],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"Relative to the strongest rival, a pre-term manual audit, the candidate's testable contrast is artifact-level lifecycle control across course generations: explicit states and expiry cues prioritize review, dependency and exception gates constrain disposition, and quarantine plus restoration preserve recoverability. The claim is structural rather than a claim of superior effect.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"The instructor of record and designated instructional designer may change ordinary artifact states; accessibility staff must approve disposition of accommodation-linked supports, and the appropriate academic-records or program authority must clear grade-review, accreditation, legal, or contested-course holds.","authorized_first_step":"Run a read-only inventory and classification exercise in one consenting course; propose lifecycle states and review priorities without changing learner visibility, retention, or stored content.","excluded_actions":["Automatically delete, archive, unpublish, or alter any instructional artifact.","Change grades, assessment rules, learning outcomes, or accommodation eligibility.","Expose student records or accommodation details beyond already authorized personnel.","Apply expiry rules retroactively to student submissions, feedback, or official academic records.","Override accessibility, legal, accreditation, grade-review, or instructor holds.","Treat an age-weighted score as disposition authority."],"halt_rollback":"Halt if the inventory exposes protected information, cannot distinguish support artifacts from official records, produces unresolved accommodation or assessment dependencies, or misidentifies current guidance as stale. Because the first step is read-only, rollback consists of withdrawing the provisional registry and review labels; any later pilot must restore quarantined artifacts and prior visibility from the deletion audit if a dependency or learner-impact signal appears."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"In the sampled course, successive offerings may not contain materially distinct support layers: apparent duplicates could be intentionally stable resources, old artifacts may already be inaccessible to learners, and staff may reliably identify the current version through existing course-copy practices.","problem_falsifier":"The problem is not supported if a complete inventory shows that learner-visible support artifacts have current owners and validations, no material contradictions or retired references, and no ambiguous dependencies across the sampled course generations.","intervention_falsifier":"The intervention is not supported if independent reviewers cannot classify artifacts and dependencies with acceptable agreement, if the registry fails to identify known seeded stale artifacts, or if it adds review work without improving correct identification of current versus superseded guidance in a bounded task.","risks":["Composite scores may create false precision or encode reviewers' pedagogical preferences.","Age may be mistaken for staleness even when an old explanation remains valid.","Access-frequency signals may disadvantage essential but rarely used accessibility or safety supports.","Incomplete dependency maps may falsely label load-bearing artifacts safe to retire.","Lifecycle labels may confuse learners if exposed without clear wording.","Quarantine may conflict with a mandatory destruction rule or preserve sensitive content longer than authorized.","Restore tests may succeed for sampled formats while other archived materials remain unreadable.","Registry maintenance may itself accumulate stale metadata and exception holds."]},"next_evidence_step":"Within one consenting course that has four available offering snapshots, build a read-only inventory of at most 80 instructor-created support artifacts. Two authorized reviewers independently label currentness, learner visibility, owner, dependencies, retention exception, and proposed lifecycle state. Seed no more than eight synthetic stale-reference cases in a duplicate sandbox shell, then measure reviewer agreement, detection of the seeded cases, false flags against instructor-confirmed current artifacts, unresolved-dependency frequency, and time required. Do not change the live course. Proceed to a reversible unpublishing pilot only if the instructor, instructional designer, and any relevant accessibility authority review the findings and separately authorize it.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":[],"conceptual_changes":[],"operational_changes":[],"evidence_changes":[],"claim_changes":[]}}