William Stein: SageMathCloud Course Management

SageMathCloud now has some very rudimentary course management functionality.  Though still very basic, it makes it much, much easier to make files available to students, collect homework, etc., entirely using SageMathCloud (without having to use email or any other submissions systems or github to share files).   To get started, create a new course by clicking on +New, then typing the name of your course and click "Course":



Course documents allow you to manage a list of students, create projects for each of them, share homework and folders with them, collect homework, and grade and return it to students.

Add Students

To add a student to your course, click on the Students tab, then type a student's name or email address in the "Add student" box to the right and press enter or click the button. Searching for an email address is best, since you can be certain that the person you're adding is really a student in your course (instead of an unknown SageMathCloud user with the same name); moreover, if your student doesn't already have an account, they will receive an invitation via email. (NOTE: There is currently no way to add dozens of students at once.)



Once you add a student, click on Create Project next to your student's name to create their project. You own the project, and they will be added as a collaborator, and invited by email if they do not yet have an account.






 Don't worry, student projects are hidden by default from your main project listing.


(To delete a student, click to the right of the student. You can toggle whether deleted students are shown in settings.)

Add Assignments

To create an assignment, first click New in the upper left of your project to create a new folder, and create or add files to it, as usual. Click on the Assignments tab of the course, then search for the folder by typing some part of its name in the box on the far right. Click to select the folder and it will be added to your list of assignments. To make copies of this folder available to all of your students whose projects you have created, click the Assign button. NOTE: You can share arbitrary folders with any contents with your students -- folders don't have to contain "assignments", and may contain anything, Sage worksheets, IPython notebooks, LaTeX documents, etc.

Collecting and Grading Assignments

To collect an assignment from your students, click Collect to the right of an assignment to collect it from all students. (NOTE: There is currently no way to schedule collection to happen at a specific time -- it happens when you click the button. Click it again to update the collected files.)
Once the assignments are collected, click Grade and select a student to jump to the folder that contains the collected version of a student's assignment. Edit the files there, indicating grades on each problem, etc. NOTE: There is no special support yet for recording grades, knowing which homework you have graded already, etc.
When you are done grading, click Return Graded to return the graded homework to the students. If the homework folder is called homework1, then the graded version will appear in the student's project as homework1-graded.

Course Settings

Set the title and description of the course in the Settings tab. When you change these, the new title and description propagates automatically to all student projects for this course.

Other

• A Video Tutorial

Technical Remarks

The underlying file format of a .course file is a plain text file with one line in JSON format for each student, shared assignment, and for settings.