Class2Go is Stanford's internal open-source platform for on-line education. A team of eight built the first version over the summer 2012, and it is still under active development. Class2Go launched in Fall for six on-campus classes and of internal classes and two large open two (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 was built to be an open platform for learning and research. Professors will have access to the data for their classes 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 best facilitates this
If you are interested in reaching the team email us at c2g-contact@class.stanford.edu.
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. 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.
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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 and 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 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.
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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.
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
We welcome others contributing to the project. Begin by checking out our source from here and using the README_SETUP.md file to get a development environment set up. There are also some docs available on the Project Wiki here on GitHub.
Before sending unsolicited pull requests it is often best to discuss your intentions with the core dev team. Send us mail: c2g-contact@class.stanford.edu.
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.