1
1 Comment

Ask IH: Does anyone work on interactive programming courses?

I'm working on an online course on graph algorithms for my university. I asked HN what platform I should use to build my course on and couldn't get a convincing answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17440770

I can see two solutions for building such a course. The first one is general-purpose LMS with a plugin which lets you implement an online judge. This approach requires a great amount of customization if you want to do it right. The second one is a platform like stepik.org, but these platforms constraint a lot what you can and what you can't do with your course. For example, you don't have a control over the testing environment and cannot install libraries by yourself.

Right now I'm thinking about building my own solution – a simple self-hosted solution which lets you create interactive programming courses and includes:

  • programming assignments in any popular language
  • automation testing
    I want to make it very light and extendable, this way you don't need to customize a lot of things and still have an ability to build any course you might think of.

I'd like to hear about your experience of creating an online course. What solutions have you used? Would you use a solution I described? Any other thoughts on this topic? Thanks!

  1. 1

    I recently took a programming course and regretted it. I paid a lot of money for the course, but I can't cope with the tasks they ask me to do. I'm in a panic.