In late 2015 I started to build my first open-source tool for educators. I didn't think of it that way at the time. I just had a problem I needed to solve. Storing everything inside a Learning Management System meant the content lived with the institution or the vendor, in formats constrained to a platform. That was true in 2015. It's more true now, as platforms consolidate and the companies behind them change hands.
It wasn't quite my first time. Starting in 1989 and through most of the 1990s I was fortunate to have co-authored and developed interactive software in HyperCard and SuperCard, designed courseware interfaces, and taught interactive multimedia – work I loved, but that faded as the Web took center stage. When I found myself back at the problem in 2015, it felt less like starting something new and more like picking up a thread I'd already started.
I was pouring a lot of effort into the experience and content for my CMPT-363 User Interface Design course – syllabi, readings, guides, schedules, module pages – and I wanted that content to be as open and portable as the ideas inside it. In my case that meant Canvas. I wanted the content to belong to me – as constraint-free as possible – and ultimately to be freely shareable with anyone who could benefit from it.
The answer was Grav.
Platforms come and go. Markdown files don't. That's the idea this work has been built on – and why every tool in this story runs on the same open, portable Markdown files.
The answer started with the Grav CMS – a flat-file system with no database, where all content lives as Markdown files you can open in any text editor. Pair it with the Git Sync plugin and those files stay automatically backed up in a GitHub or Codeberg repository. You control them. You can move them. They'll outlast any platform.
In April 2016 I released the Grav Open Course Hub for my fellow tech-savvy open educators – a course companion site that could stand alone or embed cleanly into Canvas or Moodle. The idea I kept coming back to was a "flipped LMS": your content lives outside the platform, in files you control, but students never have to leave their course shell to reach it. The LMS handles grades and rosters. Your content stays under your full control.
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“I wanted to use something to get around the restrictions of our LMS. Everything was so plain vanilla there, and didn't provide the flexibility I needed. Grav Open Course Hub was the perfect answer to my problem.” — C. Corritore, Professor, Heider College of Business, Creighton University
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In 2017 that foundation branched in two directions. The Grav Open Publishing Space applied the same Git Sync approach to open publishing – blogs, OER collections, collaborative content that didn't fit a course structure. The Grav Learn2 with Git Sync brought the same version-controlled workflow to documentation sites, for educators and teams building knowledge bases they could collaboratively maintain through GitHub.
By 2021 the natural next step had arrived: Grav Open MultiCourse Hub, for educators running several courses who wanted one installation with course grouping by term or program.
Four projects. The same throughline: Markdown files, Git Sync, no database, and content that you fully control. Each has since been succeeded by a more modern alternative – the Grav Helios Course Hub for the course-focused tools, the standalone Grav Premium Helios Theme for documentation, and Grav Theme Quark2 or the Grav Premium Typhoon Theme for open publishing.
The Grav tools worked well – but I wanted to reach more open educators and publishers. They required a PHP web server and some comfort with configuration. For many people, that was a real hurdle. I kept thinking about how to bring the same model to more people with less technical burden.
In 2021 I released an initial set of Docsify Starter Kits – three GitHub templates (Docsify Open Course Starter Kit, Docsify Open MultiCourse Starter Kit, and Docsify Open Publishing Starter Kit) that ran entirely on GitHub Pages.
No web server. No hosting costs. No build process.
The same Git-backed, educator-owned content model, now accessible to anyone comfortable with GitHub.
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“I love that I can host my courses with GitHub Pages and that I can easily mirror content in my college's CMS, Brightspace.” — A. Blacquiere, DIGITAL Design + Development Faculty, North Island College
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