Paul Cantrell
Driven by my eternal hatred for Moodle, I wrote a static site generator for a course web site (https://comp127.macalester.digital/f25/). I like it, and I’m poking at documenting and open-sourcing it so that other instructors can use it for their own courses if they want to.
It needs a cute name. Suggestion box is now open in the replies.
aburka 🫣
@inthehands doomle
Paul Cantrell
@FreakyClaudi
I’ve been teaching courses using Moodle since 2008, and have read substantial portions of the Moodle source code. I’m familiar with it, thanks.
I’m sure it serves the needs of many situations and many people quite well. It serves my needs extremely poorly — thus my desire to build a different tool that solves a different set of problems.
When the information you have to share is “I don’t have the same problem as you and I prefer a different tool,” you can always just choose not to reply.
Claudia Schwemmers
@inthehands Sorry, but this looks extremely boring. I know that Moodle might be difficult to use at the beginning but you can build fantastic courses with individual self-learning paths which are motivating for students. At first glance Moodle looks old-fashioned and boring but it has so much more to offer than just data files’ upload. No other LMS has as much to offer as Moodle. #moodle
Paul Cantrell
@mdione
Paulific CourseMaterials 365
Marcos Dione
@inthehands "Paul CanTeach".
Paul Cantrell
@SteveBellovin
Sounds like we have a similar approach: I still use the college’s LMS for tracking grades and handling non-Git submissions (for the same privacy & security reasons), so the LMS site is just a bag of assignment names without dates. All dates and course content go on the course site.
I like your site! Simple, straightforward, vibes of the 1999 web in the best way. I do a simple thing where there’s “what happens on this day?” box for each day of class, though there’s enough class meetings that I split them into separate pages instead of scrolling:
https://comp127.macalester.digital/s26/schedule/2026-02-06
…and then have a separate timeline page to serve as an overview:
Steve Bellovin
@inthehands Let me know what your second-best choice is — I need to document my version (see https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/classes/f23/lectures.html for sample output) and post it somewhere, and I haven't even thought about a name. I've always posted my course material online and freely available, which is one reason I don't lock it up inside Canvas, but I despise Canvas about as much as you despise Moodle. (I've used Canvas only for grade recording—I didn't want to deal with the privacy issues of managing students' access to their own grades, plus the integration with the university's final grade system—and for the in-class chat room, since like you I prefer static web sites.)
Aside: my version started as a simple Python script to generate the list of dates for my lectures in any given semester, and it grew…
Ken Butler
@xcorvis @inthehands or maybe even the *home* of a cute animal, since a website is the course home.
xcorvis
@inthehands possible nose-thumbing with Muddle, Mogul, or Meddle, (or Moogle for the Final Fantasy fans)
Other low effort suggestions: Classy, Coursica, HomeRoom, SillyBus
Or you could always name it after a cute animal or maybe a flower.
Paul Cantrell
@SteveBellovin
APL! Nice!!
I increasingly try to decenter grades from my teaching, but if I’m assigning them, agreed that it’s very important for me and the students to share a single source of truth about what was recorded.
Steve Bellovin
@inthehands Reasonable approach! Once I document my script, I'll open-source it and let others add that enhancement…
As for grade-recording: I first started teaching back when I was a grad student. Very early on, a student complained to me about her grade and showed me that I'd recorded it incorrectly. This horrified me, so I immediately wrote a grade-recording and calculation system (in APL…), and used it to create tear-sheets to hand to each student with their grades, there being no online way to send them in those days.
Steve Bellovin
@inthehands I hate grading and everything that goes with it, e.g., exams. (Aside: in Spring 2020, when we went fully remote under emergency circumstances and all classes were pass/fail, I tried to cancel the final by announcing that at that point, everyone in the class was passing and I was happy to stick with that. A fair number of students insisted on a final exam… I was *extremely* liberal with exemption requests.) And I categorically refused to use any of these remote proctoring solutions, for many different reasons.
Paul Cantrell
@SteveBellovin
Agreed to all that.
At this point I think I’ve managed to fully expunge exams from my teaching. There was one course where I suspended exams in 2020-2021, and found that there •was• loss for the students: “you have to think through this for yourself, using your own brain, on paper” turned out to serve a useful purpose for them. I now have a set of “conceptual puzzles,” machine-generated to allow infinite practice and infinite attempts, which seem to be filling that niche better than exams did.
In my mid- and upper-level courses, I’ve reached a point of good success with various “ungrading” and grade-as-afterthought strategies that put focus squarely where it belongs: on the learning and on the people. It’s proved harder in the intro courses, where the course may feel like a box to check and students don’t necessarily come in invested in the learning. In those courses, I refer to grading as “methadone for extrinsic motivation:” some of them are addicted to the external stimulus of grades, and I’m trying to get them unhooked.
Paul Cantrell
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.