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Open-Source Projects

Open-source projects are learning technologies that are open to the public to view, download, install, and use. The original source code is made freely available, so these projects also encourage contributions, meaning people who download and change the code can in turn share their changes for everyone else to use.

The LT Hub has started several open-source projects and contributes to existing open-source projects started by others.

Projects We Lead

Projects that we have started and continue to maintain include ComPAIR, iPeer, and the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) Shim.

ComPAIR

ComPAIR is UBC’s homegrown peer review tool that adds comparing to the process of students reviewing one another’s work. In ComPAIR, students see pairs of their peers’ assignments presented side-by-side for criteria-guided comparison and feedback. Students learn by comparing and identifying strengths or weaknesses that may not be as evident in an isolated assignment, encouraging productive peer feedback and critical thinking.

You can learn more on ComPAIR’s support website and other institutions can download the ComPAIR application from the GitHub repository.

iPeer

iPeer is a peer review application for having students assess their team members’ contributions to group assignments. These evaluations can help students reflect on teamwork and their own participation and can help you understand how well groups are working together and how much each individual student is contributing.

You can learn more on iPeer’s support website and other institutions can download the iPeer application from the GitHub repository.

Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) Shim

The LTI Shim is an intermediary application that works as a go-between to help a Learning Management System (LMS) like Canvas communicate with other learning technologies while protecting student privacy. The goal of the LTI Shim is to help instructors use third-party tools with less privacy risk.

The LTI Shim protects privacy by masking or not passing any personally identifiable information about students from the LMS to the other learning technology. For example, imagine that you had a course set up in Canvas and you wanted to use another tool in your course like Piazza (which is hosted outside of Canada). The LTI Shim would work behind-the-scenes to ensure that any student data sent to Piazza would not be able to identify an individual student.

The LTI Shim is still under active development. Other institutions can download the LTI Shim beta application from the GitHub repository.

 

Projects We Contribute To

The LT Hub contributes to several open-source projects. The following are a few notable examples.

Webwork

Webwork is an online assignment and quiz tool​ for numeric problems and equations that allows you to create custom problems or choose from a library and assign these on an individual student basis as part of homework sets or quizzes. Students can receive instant feedback after answering each problem and have multiple attempts, in order to better understand their learning.

My Learning Analytics (MyLA)

MyLA is a University of Michigan project for student dashboards that gives students insight into their engagement with the course content, encouraging them toward behavioural patterns that can improve academic outcomes.

OnTask

OnTask is a learning analytics tool for sending targeted feedback to students to help with their learning in an automated but personalized way. With OnTask, you create custom feedback to send to groups of students meeting specific learning criteria. Students will receive these messages as individual feedback from you. This process makes meaningful communication with students easier to manage, even with large class sizes.

Canvas API Scripts

Canvas provides an API (Application Programming Interface) that allows people to accomplish tasks that might be difficult or repetitive to do manually within Canvas. The LT Hub has developed or contributed to a number of projects under the Canvas API User Community: