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Class2Go

Class2Go is Stanford's internal open-source platform for on-line courses. We began building Class2Go in June 2012. A team of eight has worked on it through the summer, and it is launching Fall 2012 for a handful of internal classes and two public classes (MOOC's): [Computer Networking] [net] and [Solar Cells, Fuel Cells, and Batteries] [sol] [net]: http://networking.class.stanford.edu/ [sol]: http://solar.class.stanford.edu/

Class2Go is intended to be an open platform for learning and research. Professors will have direct access to the data for their classes to learn how their students learn. We will facilitate experiments. This could be A/B/N testing of how different things affect student learning, or even bespoke code to try out interesting new features.

If you are interested in discussing with us, the team can be reached at class2go-contact@cs.stanford.edu

Philosophy

There are som principles that have guided our project:

  • 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, or to collaborate with similar efforts in other places.

  • Portable. We believe strongly that 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. And our exercises and problem sets, instead of being trapped in a proprietary database, are in the Khan Academy format, so they can be used elsewhere.

  • 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.

Key Features

To bring this to life we've built a system. Here are some of its important and distinguishing features.

  • Video and Problem Set Management. Professors (and TA's) can upload assets to S3; videos are then uploaded to YouTube.

  • Exercises. We support two kinds of exercises: formative (for learning) and summative (for assessment, like quizzes and tests). Students can attempt each problem as many times as they want without penalty in formative problem sets, 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.

  • 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, a TA) doesn't have to click a button at midnight to publish a problem set.

  • Frame Extraction. We have a tool for extracting frames from a video (using ffmpeg) differencing them to find key frames, and then using thumbnails of these frames as an index to the video. It's called the Kelvinator after its author, Kelvin Do.

Leveraging Others

Thanks to all the projects we are relying on to make this work. Some commercial, some open source. But a ton of good stuff.

  • [YouTube] yt for video
  • [Khan Academy] ka for their HTML-based exercise framework
  • [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

License

Copyright 2012 Stanford University

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.