Want to provide instructors with the flexibility of a personal open platform that is database free while still keeping sensitive student data on university servers? Looking to enable course participants to contribute to their own online open environment? Want to help instructors meet unmet pedagogical goals due to current LMS constraints? The modern flat-file CMS Grav (getgrav.org) might be your answer!

In this session university instructor and open source developer Paul Hibbitts will give an overview of the Grav CMS and demonstrate three current open source Grav packages; Course Hub, OER Content Space and ePortfolio Blog. Course Hub was designed to help tech-savvy instructors enhance their students’ learning experience by providing an open and collaborative multi-device environment under the full control of the instructor. The OER Content Space was created to both share and collaboratively update open educational resources by leveraging an easy-to-use visual theme builder (gantry.org), platform-independent Markdown content and ‘set-and-forget’ syncing with Git repository services such as GitHub or a locally hosted GitLab instance.

ePortfolio Blog is a project similar to OER Content Space, but aimed at tech-savvy students who want to publish an ePortfolio where they keep complete control of all their content and publishing workflow using modern Web services like GitHub or GitLab. As a bonus, each Grav package can be installed and fully configured in under two minutes.

Speaker

Paul Hibbits

Instructor and Open Source Developer, Simon Fraser University