Exploring and Building Open [Source] Software for Tech-savvy Educators and OER Publishers

With an unexpected opportunity to teach SFU CMPT 363 User Interface Design this summer, I’ve been feverishly working in the open on the accompanying Canvas LMS site (leveraging my Grav Open Course Hub project) so that potential students can better self-assess course fit before our first class me...

I recently tweeted a set of updated Grav Open Course Hub workflow diagrams, and I thought I would share them here:

Figure 1. Grav Open Course Hub Workflow.

I recently tweeted a few highlights about the 2.0 release of the Open Course Hub and I thought I would share them here:

It's official, release 2.0 of the @getgrav Open Course Hub package is now available for download on the https://t.co/IGIDXHRrCP site🍻 https://t.co/9PFedwpqcF

— Hibbitts Design (@hibbittsdesign) January 22, 2018

I am excited to be part of SFU’s DEMOfest this year, where I will be presenting and discussing with my fellow educators the advantages of using the Canvas LMS with Grav:

Canvas Assessment Strengths

• Assignment submissions and rubrics
• Surveys, quizzes, and graded discussion forums
• Multi-course calendar and gradebook
  A safe place for student assignments and data, and where most of our students are!

Grav Content Management System Strengths

• Free open source software (FOSS) project
• A modern flat-file (no database) CMS, which supports custom page types and modular content
• The platform-independent format Markdown is supported, and pages remain as individual files
• Fully extensible, with support for HTML, CSS, Twig, JavaScript, Google Fonts, YAML, etc.
  For tech-savvy educators a modern and flexible platform under their full control!

While I’ve been in ‘heads-down’ mode with my SFU CMPT 363 User Interface Design course for the start of the Fall term, I thought I would share here news of my most recent Grav open education project!

Grav Open Publishing Space Space with Git Sync is designed to publish, share and collaboratively edit Markdown-based content using the modern flat-file Grav CMS.

Figure 1. Open Publishing Space

I’ve been once again feverishly working in the open on the Fall 2017 Course Hub (built with my Grav Open Course Hub and using a flipped-LMS approach, naturally!) for SFU CMPT 363 so that potential students can better self-assess course fit before our first class meets in-person on Sept 6th.

Th...

Here is a brief video demonstrating how Grav with Git Sync can be configured to use GitBook for collaboratively editing Markdown content.

Look of interest? For step-by-step instructions visit learn.hibbittsdesign.org/grav-with-gitsync-and-gitbook.

A collection of videos demonstrating how Grav with Git Sync can bring an efficient and flexible Markdown content workflow into Canvas LMS (or any other system supporting embeddable Web pages).

I recently tweeted some key aspects of when to use the Grav CMS in the field of education, and I thought I would share them here:

(1/14) It's not WordPress or Grav, but when WordPress and when Grav. If WordPress meets all your needs as an educator, then that's AWESOME!🙌

— Hibbitts Design (@hibbittsdesign) June 5, 2017

I recently tweeted some reasons why the Grav Open Course Hub is actually Open, and I thought I would share them here:

(1/5) What makes the @getgrav CMS Open Course Hub, well… open?

— Hibbitts Design (@hibbittsdesign) April 13, 2017