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University Web Logo

This Ruby on Rails application provides facilities to support a community of teachers and learners. It currently offers the essentials needed to manage multiple courses, and we are now also developing other features for enabling members of the community to work together.

University Web is developed by the Mendicant University, an online learning community, and it is our core infrastructure. We expect it to become potentially useful to other organizations, and hope that it will be adopted elsewhere as it becomes mature.

Whether you are a member of Mendicant University or a developer interested in systems for learning and education, we encourage you to check out the source code: http://github.com/rmu/university-web

If you are not a member of Mendicant University, please get in touch through our public channels:

Key Features

University Web is constantly evolving, but currently offers the following functionality:

  • Administration of course admissions
  • Course management
  • Assignment tracking
  • A clean and user-friendly interface for students
  • IRC channel integration
  • In application document system

Installation

University Web is a Ruby on Rails 3 application which runs on Ruby 1.9.2 and on PostgreSQL databases. Other databases like MySQL or SQLite are not officially supported.

Always use the latest source code: We are constantly working on this application, with bug fixes and new features added daily, so please use the very latest source code.

Setting Up a Development Copy: Step by Step

To install a development version of University Web, follow these steps:

  1. Fork our GitHub repository: http://github.com/rmu/university-web
  2. Clone the fork to your computer
  3. Run bundle install to install all of the dependencies

To configure University Web [Basic]:

  1. Create a database.yml file in config. The config directory contains an example database.yml for PostgreSQL.

  2. Create a config/initializers/secret_token.rb file. The config/initializers directory contains an example secret_token.rb file with instructions for generating a secret token.

  3. Run the Rails tasks to initialize a development and a test database:

    $ bundle exec rake db:migrate
$ bundle exec rake db:test:prepare

  4. Generate the static site by running:

    $ bundle exec rake public-site:generate

  5. Finally, run the test suite to make sure everything is working correctly:

    $ bundle exec rake test

To configure University Web [Full]:

  1. Follow the steps in To configure University Web [Basic]
  2. Create a config/github.yml files. The config directory contains an example github.yml file.

Using University Web

Users

  • University Web user accounts may be either admins, students, or guests.
  • Every account is identified by email address.
  • The admin users may access all of the management features of University Web by choosing Administration from the navigation menu at the top of page.
  • The management features of University Web enable admin users to perform the standard tasks for running courses, such as creating other user accounts for students and guests, defining the courses and managing assignment submissions.

Terms

  • Each term is a group of one or more courses.
  • To create a new term, login as an admin user, and choose Administration > Terms > Create Term.

Courses

  • To create a new course, choose Administration > Courses > Create New Course.
  • Once you have created a course, use the course form to attach a user to it as an instructor, along with students and assignments. The next section explains assignments.
  • You may group courses into terms. Courses don't have to be associated with a term.

Assignments

  • Each course may have one or more assignments attached to it.
  • To create or manage assignments for a course, choose Administration > Courses, click on the Assignments link next to the name of the course, and choose Create New Assignment.
  • Once an assignment has been created, some or all of the students in the course may then be set that assignment.
  • The students may use the University Web interface to submit work for an assignment.
  • The course instructor can then review the submissions for an assignment, and take appropriate actions, such as commenting or marking the assignment as completed.

Github Integration

  • After a student makes a submission for an assignment, an instructor needs to review the student's code. For this reason, University Web shows the student's github commit activity on the submissions page.
  • In order to configure this integration, the student should set their github username on the profile page and set the github repository specific to each assignment on the submissions page.
  • Once configured, University Web will periodically check for new github commits. It may take up to 15 minutes before new commits will appear on the submissions page.

Contributing

Approved features are tracked in Pivotal Tracker while bugs and requested features should be entered into Github Issues.

Contributors retain copyright to their work but must agree to release their contributions under the Affero GPL version 3

If you would like to help with developing University Web, please get in touch! Our contact details are at the top of this file.

Submitting a Pull Request

  1. Fork the project.
  2. Create a topic branch.
  3. Implement your feature or bug fix.
  4. Add documentation for your feature or bug fix.
  5. Add tests for your feature or bug fix.
  6. Run rake test. If your changes are not 100% covered, go back to step 5.
  7. If your change affects something in this README, please update it
  8. Commit and push your changes.
  9. Submit a pull request.

University Web - a Mendicant University project