Exploring and Building Open [Source] Software for Tech-savvy Educators and OER Publishers

Documentation for hibbittsdesign.org Grav open education projects is now available at learn.hibbittsdesign.org.

Served using Grav and the Learn2 with Git Sync theme for an open and collaborative workflow… of course!

Figure 1. New Grav open education project docs at learn.hibbittsd...

This is a guide on how to setup your Grav Course Hub for a single course using the Admin Panel (accessed by adding ‘/admin’ to the Browser URL of your Grav site) or directly working with files. This guide assumes you have the Grav Course Hub up and running and that you are familiar with the basics of Grav.

In this article, we will look at how to use Grav with GitHub Desktop and GitLab. Unlike GitHub, you can install GitLab onto your own server, which is an attractive option for many higher education institutions. A locally hosted version of GitLab is used in this walkthrough.

This is a brief guide to help tech-savvy educators ‘flip’ their LMS with the modern flat-file (no database) CMS Grav and my open source Course Hub skeleton package.

As a modern flat-file CMS, Grav can take full advantage of today’s ecosystem of open and collaborative editing services, such as GitHub or GitLab. In this article we will look at how to easily use Grav with GitHub Desktop (which uses GitHub and Git for source control) and the automatic deployment service Deploy to result in a very efficient, open and collaborative workflow. No scripting or command line interactions will be required, I promise.

Recently, I’ve been exploring ways to use the modern flat-file CMS Grav as a simple open publishing tool. Grav is a natural candidate for this usage, as all content is stored as individual files which can be stored on a variety of open and collaborative editing environments (e.g. GitHub).

One of the (many) great things about using the open source CMS Grav for a flipped-LMS approach is that no database is required, which makes running a local copy of Grav on your computer for testing purposes a very straightforward process. This also makes deployment to a Web server a breeze - just a simple folder copy.