Class2Go is Stanford's internal open-source platform for on-line education. A team of eight built the first version over Summer 2012. Class2Go launched Fall 2012 and since then we've hosted several "massive open online courses" (MOOC's) and on-campus classes. The big MOOC's we hosted were [Computer Networking][net] and [Solar Cells, Fuel Cells, and Batteries][sol] in Fall 2012, and [Introduction to Databases][db] in Winter 2013. [net]: http://networking.class.stanford.edu/ [sol]: http://solar.class.stanford.edu/ [db]: http://db.class2go.stanford.edu/
On April 3rd [we announced][ann-s] that Class2Go is merging with the edX platform. The Stanford Online engineering team is now working on the edX code base with the goal of standing up our own instance and using it for Stanford MOOC's, on-campus classes, distance learners, and educational research. EdX will be released under the AGPL open-source license by June 1st.
The Class2Go project is in maintenance mode. For more information, see the [announcement][ann-f] on the Class2Go Forum. [ann-s]: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/april/edx-collaborate-platform-030313.html [ann-f]: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/class2go-users/lPGL4R74HPE
Class2Go was built to be an open platform for learning and research. Professors have access to the classes' data to learn how their students learn. We will facilitate experiments. For example, we intend this to be the best plaform for running A/B/N tests to measure the impact of different teaching methods on student outcomes, or to build interesting features to try out new ways of presenting material or grading exercises. We believe an open source platform is the best way to do this.
For community support of c2g users, we have a Google group at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/class2go-users.
If you are interested in reaching the team email us at [email protected].
If you are interested in evaluating the Class2Go platform, you can explore Class2Go through two courses we have created. The [Introduction to Class2Go][howto] course highlights the major features of the platform and includes guides for adding content to a Class2Go course and templates for creating problem sets, exams, or surveys. [howto]: http://class2go.stanford.edu/class2go/howto/
The [Class2Go Sandbox][sandbox] course allows access to the administrator features of the Class2Go platform. You are welcome to access this course to test adding and updating course materials through the admin interface. The public login (username: class2go, password: class2go) gives access to both courses. [sandbox]: http://class2gosandbox.com/sandbox/C2G
There are some principles that have guided our project:
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Open. The platform is open source to make it easier for users (faculty members) to give us feedback on what we are doing. We would love to have others use the platform. We are working with others who are interested in using Class2Go for on-line education: universities, private schools, even NGO's.
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Portable. Valuable course content shouldn't be tied to any one platform. Documents are already portable; the videos are outside our system (on YouTube) and the assets themselves can be repurposed as faculty see fit.
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Interoperable. We don't want to build or maintain more than we have to. See the section below for a list of all the shoulders we are standing on.
To bring this to life we've built a system. Here are some of its important distinguishing features.
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Video and Problem Set Management. Professors (and TA's) can upload assets to S3; videos are then uploaded to YouTube.
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Exercises. We support two kinds of exercises: formative, for learning and encouraging engagement; and summative, for assessment, like quizzes and tests. Students can attempt each formative problems many times as they want without penalty, but may be penalized for multiple submissions in summative sets. In both types of problem sets, feedback is available immediately so students can learn along the way.
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Content Management. We have built a simple content management system where course information (videos, static pages, problem sets) can be created, reviewed, and then published. One important ability is an automatic live date, so a professor (or, most likely, their TA) doesn't have to click a button at midnight to publish a problem set.
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Frame Extraction. We have a simple tool for extracting frames from a video (using
ffmpeg) and differencing them to find key frames. The thumbnails of these frames are used as an index to the video for navigation. It's called the Kelvinator after its first author, Kelvin Do. -
Reporting. We have a set of ad-hoc and scheduled reports so teachers can get feedback and adjust.
Thanks to all the projects we are relying on to make this work. Some are commercial, some open source. But a ton of good stuff.
- [YouTube] yt and [Popcorn.js] pop for video
- [Piazza] pz for forums
- [MySQL] mys is our database
- The massive [Python] p [Django] dj ecosystem: eg. South, Registration
- [Amazon AWS] a suite for hosting (EC2, S3, RDS, Route53, IAM)
- Chef from [Opscode] oc for configuration management
- [Github] gh for source code management and issues
We welcome others contributing to Class2Go. Begin by checking out our source from here and using README_SETUP.md to get a development environment set up. There are also some docs available on the Project Wiki on GitHub.
Before sending unsolicited pull requests it is often best to discuss your intentions with the core dev team. Send us mail: [email protected].
If you want to get an idea of the kinds of things to do on the project,
check out our
issue list on GitHub.
We keep it here for all to see. Feel free to comment on bugs and make
suggestions. If you want to fix a bug, go ahead and fork, fix, test, and
send a pull request.
We intend for other colleges, universities, and even private organizations to be able to stand up their own instance of Class2Go to host their own courses. Unfortunately, the tooling and instructions for this aren't turnkey just yet. We also need to do some development to make it less Stanford-specific. Maybe you can help with that?
If you're interested, your first step, just like other contributions, is to stand up a development environment on your own machine and try it out. We have people who got this demo-sized Class2Go up and running pretty quickly on their local machine.
Send us mail at [email protected] and we can give you an idea what would be involved.
If you are interested in evaluating the Class2Go platform before trying to stand up your own instance, you can explore Class2Go through two courses we have created. The [Introduction to Class2Go][howto] course highlights the major features of the platform and includes guides for adding content to a Class2Go course and templates for creating problem sets, exams, or surveys. [howto]: http://class2go.stanford.edu/class2go/howto/
The [Class2Go Sandbox][sandbox] course allows access to the administrator features of the Class2Go platform. You are welcome to access this course to test adding and updating course materials through the admin interface. The public login (username: class2go, password: class2go) gives access to both courses. [sandbox]: http://class2go.stanford.edu/sandbox/C2G/
Setup an institution via the admin panel found at your-url-here/admin using the superuser credentials created in the installation process of Class2Go. (Installation is found in other README docs in this repo.)
Setup instructors via the admin panel, and then create courses at your-url-here/courses/new. This will only work if you are logged in as the superuser.
Make sure to run "pip install django-celery" or you will get import errors.
Make sure you do the "workon class2go" command before trying to run the server, otherwise you will run into import errors.
Run the server with "python manage.py runserver 8100".
WIP
restart nginx with "sudo fuser -k 80/tcp ; sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart"
If you get errors like this: [ERROR] Connection in use: ('0.0.0.0', 80) [ERROR] Retrying in 1 second. [ERROR] Can't connect to ('0.0.0.0', 80)
run this command: sudo fuser -n tcp 80
collect the process IDs (PIDs)
run this command with the collected PIDs: sudo kill -9 [PID] [PID] [PID] (insert the PIDS from the previous command)
Copyright 2012 Stanford University
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