Current Version

01/27/2012 - I partially converted to mercurial but than two things happened: the wiki articles disappeared, and the project activity dropped from medium to low. I switched back to SVN and both of those problems disappeared. I will eventually migrate the wiki articles over and without elaborating, resign to the fact that Google Code has some really terrible pit falls to it. I am considering more and more porting the mainline release onto gitHub to facilitate community branches and open development. Ultimately some developments would be merged into the project, and then eventually back over here at Google code. In a way it becomes a management nightmare, but at least we have some ideas and goals defined for the kinds of improvements we'd actually like to see integrated in.

11/23/2011 - Development has been stalled as I've accepted full time work. Plans to continue open sourcing this project include converting the experimental branch to Mercurial (hg) after the new year. New year plans are to continue perusing language translations (translators), removing or abstracting Apache-only dependencies (mod_auth_token), improved bug reporting and order priorities going forwards. Interested in contributing? Please inquire within ... Mercurial will provide us with better overall branching support and I think will be more reliable.

03/31/2011 - Cleaned up experimental branch and merged complete changeset into trunk. Deployed new version to the Demo site also. Version now is: 0.5.9 trunk. See CHANGE_LOG.txt for details.

Development Status

2/14/2011 - From now on, all code updates will be tracked in the commit log and can be viewed using FishEye. Major project updates will be published on the Classcomm.org Word Press site. Finally, version notes will be kept in the change log.

Description:

Perfect for companies, colleges, schools, community organizations and collectives wishing to deliver courses via the Internet on an internal deployment of Classcomm. Classcomm is a set of tools for instructors and students to hand-in assignments, communicate effectively on the web, and learn new materials.

Live Demo

Presently the best way to experience Classcomm is with our advertisement-free Live Demo. You can register your free account with database encrypted password, and try out the student and instructor views. Soon you will additionally be able to create Courses on our Demo system for Demo purposes, but possibly also to offer up for open enrollments and trial your own course materials.

Please try our Live Classcomm Demo on http://classcomm.net/

Register your account and complete the activation e-mail to gain access to a deployed instance of Classcomm. Then enroll in any of our free Demo courses set for open_enrollment to demo the student portal and instructor portal. I'll be adding create-a-course app soon and better hooks so you'll be able to Demo the site-wide side better.

Current Features:

• Enroll in Courses and accept Assignments electronically.
• Serve all your media behind time-generated protected URLs.
• Provide students with internal and external course information and resources.
• Deploy quickly and rest sound on the more proven security of the Django framework.
• Supports asynchronous Course enrollment timetables, open enrollments and roster tools.
• Customized Django admin provides administrators with application data management tools.
• Project uses Hardened Web Technologies.
• Choose your own Database Implementation and use any of the libraries available with the Django Object Relational Mapper.
• Integrate our internal Django User model with your network authentication such as LDAP or OpenID using custom Django Authentication Back-ends. These back-ends are chainable to support multiple authentication systems, and can be made to work with the User model that is available across apps in the Django-classcomm project.

Major Planned Features:

• Quizzing System
• More Profile Data/Community Discussions/per Course features
• Course Lectures/tutorials (videos)
• Language Translations (will need translator volunteers)

Project Management

We are now testing project management on JIRA with GreenHopper. Our JIRA instance is @ http://jira.enscrow.com:8080/jira/ For the time being issues can be reported here on Google Code and our development team can add them as appropriate to the JIRA.

System Requirements

Any 2Ghz+ CPU, 2GB+ memory, 50GB +Hard Disk system or better running Ubuntu Linux.

Better Systems can support more Users, more content and more services.

Live Demo Currently Running On

• Django 1.3
• Python 2.6
• Apache 2.x with mod_auth_token 1.0.6 configured.
• MySQL 5 Database (using MyISAM tables to enable searching in admin tool)

Other database support inherent in Django [MySQL, Postgresql, Oracle, and several other adapters have been written].

Client

Any fairly modern to stale web-browser with an Internet connection should get valid app pages served for the URL to deployed application instance. Sessions Requires Cookies, and this project uses cookies! New versions and future versions of classcomm ship with AJAXian features so your browser should be able to support that.

Technologies

Python, Django Framework, Apache, SQL database.

History and Statistics

I started this Django project began the very end of 2007 as part of my J.Scholar Honors at Illinois. Inspired by the simple design of Course CMS prototype with the same name written in PHP, and used by the UIUC NetMath Program. The goal of this open-source Django project Classcomm has been to develop a web application CMS inside a web framework that could make quality guarantees while facilitating add-on development and agile feature releases for such a product while keeping pace with the latest web standards. The flexibility, stability and security specifications of the latest Django releases has made this an up-and coming technology suite for delivering Courses on the Web that schools will be able to deploy to their own servers or purchase instances through cloud providers for offering these services. We hope to offer and support such services ourselves in the future.

The Home Open Source Repository and de-facto wiki are home here on Google Code, although additional resources have been allocated for this project. As of the New Year (and Happy New Year to you ;-) project stats have been looking good. We have project stats for 2010 calendar year thanks to Google Analytics.

Past Calendar Year 2010

• Classcomm Project Hosting had 593 unique visitors from 53 countries/territories.
• Top 10 Countries by # of visitors: USA (360), Argentina (33), Italy (24), UK (29), France (14), Brazil (14), China (13), India (12), Germany (8), and Romania (7). This will also dictate which languages you should predict translations available for in the future.