[Microblog] Ahem

submitted by

Ahem... does anyone know of a FLOSS-y suite of tools or website I can use to stand in for the corporate ed tech my school makes us use? I am mainly looking for:

- gradebook for me

- grade record for students to check their scores/points

- space to turn in assignments

@academicchatter

#AcademicChatter

6
1

Log in to comment

Hot Top New Old
he/them

@inquiline

I wish I could help, but when I taught school, assignments were still turned in either on USB, floppy, or email, my grade report was a spreadsheet (gnumeric, in fact!) and I did cheat detection by fast buffer changing in Emacs — true story.

The kid I caught cheating (giving his programs to other students with identifiers changed) now writes proprietary software for Microsoft.

Cc:
@academicchatter
@downey

 reply
1
She/her

@inquiline @academicchatter

Does moodle count?

"Moodle LMS is open source under the GPL licence."

docs.moodle.org/500/en/Features

 reply
1

@inquiline @academicchatter there are usually privacy issues around this kind of thing, that the corporate ed tech (for all its failings) will have covered and other things may not.

 reply
1

@inquiline @academicchatter We used to have a renegade Moodle server at UoR for people who didn't want Blackboard. It was run by one maths prof. I stayed primarily with Blackboard because it interfaced well with the registry database, but had bridges set up between that and Moodle so that we could do things in Moodle that were impossible in Blackboard, and the results would go back.

For example, Blackboard (at the time) assumed that everything has to be graded and that students are pathetic dumbarses who won't do anything without extrinsic rewards and punishments and a low-intellect, absolutist epistemology in which statements are either "right" or "wrong". So we couldn't implement good questionnaires in Blackboard's quiz module. So we did that in Moodle instead.

 reply
1

@inquiline @academicchatter My Uni uses a modified version of Moodle but using it is such a pain ( I haven’t used vanilla Moodle, so maybe it is better). I have instead used my little Nextcloud instance as a filedrop for assignment submissions. I think overall that paradigm of office groupware works okay for doing classes.

You could give each student an account so that they could have their own workspace where their assignments are submitted. That way it is private and you can comment on them directly or through Nextcloud’s file comments.

As for grades, I always use a spreadsheet and generate individual grade reports. It wouldn’t be too hard to do this and distribute these reports to students’ workspaces.

Just food for thought. Let us know if you find something good! I am always trying to improve the grading workflow.

 reply
1
Insert image