Exclude courses from Library discovery

[rtibbles]

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Overview

Exclude courses from Library discovery to prevent learners from accessing course content outside the structured course experience.

Complexity: Low

Context

Courses have a modality field that identifies them. The Library already supports exclude_modality filtering. Courses should be excluded from both channel browsing and search results - learners should only access courses via the home page course cards.

Additionally, resume recommendations on the home page and library page should not show resources from inside courses. If filtering resume recommendations by course context is too complex, the fallback is to hide resume recommendations entirely when courses are active on the device.

The Change

Library exclusion:

• Add exclude_modality=Course filter to contentnode API calls in Library (channel browsing and search)

Resume recommendations:

• Filter out resources from inside courses from the resume action on UserContentNode endpoint
• Fallback: if filtering is too complex, hide resume recommendations entirely when courses are active on the device - this may happen because filtering out all resources in a specific course from recommendations might be tricky or nonperformant, or, alternatively, identifying them in the frontend via cross reference might not work reliably.

Courses active detection:

• Bootstrap a courses_active flag into learn plugin data (following coach plugin pattern)

Acceptance Criteria

Library Exclusion

• Courses excluded from channel browsing in Library
• Courses excluded from search results in Library
• exclude_modality=Course filter applied to contentnode API calls

Resume Recommendations

• Resources from inside courses do not appear in resume recommendations on home page
• Resources from inside courses do not appear in resume recommendations on library page
• (Fallback) If filtering is too complex, resume recommendations hidden entirely when courses active

Courses Active Detection

• courses_active flag bootstrapped into learn plugin data
• Flag correctly reflects whether courses exist on device

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🤖 This issue was written with AI assistance, under supervision, review and final edits by [@rtibbles] 🤖

[rtibbles]

Fixed in #14132