It's a reasonable question.  For the existing tasks, only the course_id needed to be passed, but when running subtasks, they need access to the InstructorTask.  So when I switched the API, I added entry_id but didn't remove the course_id because I didn't want to touch the code for the other tasks.  But once we pass the entry_id down and unpack it in each function, then we could unpack the task_input there as well.