Coursemology

Coursemology is an open source gamified learning platform that enables educators to increase student engagement and make learning fun.

Setting up Coursemology

System Requirements

1. Ruby (= 3.3.5)
2. Ruby on Rails (= 7.2.1)
3. PostgreSQL (>= 9.5)
4. ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick (For MiniMagick - if PDF processing doesn't work for the import of scribing questions, download Ghostscript)
5. Node.js (v18 LTS)
6. Yarn
7. Installed docker
8. Redis

Coursemology uses Ruby on Rails. In addition, some front-end components use React.js. This guide written by the awesome people at GoRails should help you to get started on Ruby on Rails (however, be careful about the Rails version that you are going to install here. Please refer to the system requirements for the version of Rails you need to have for your system)

Getting Started

1. We use submodules in the git repo; use this command to update submodules:

   $ git submodule update --init --recursive

2. Download bundler to install dependencies

   $ gem install bundler:2.5.9

3. Install ruby dependencies

   $ bundle config set --local without 'ci:production'
   $ bundle install

4. Install javascript dependencies

   $ cd client && yarn; cd -

5. Create and seed the database

   $ bundle exec rake db:setup

6. We are using Keycloak as our Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution. Before proceeding to the next step, please navigate to ./authentication folder, follow the instruction provided over the README, and then ensure that the Docker for Coursemology Authentication is running and that you are able to access the Keycloak site as mentioned in the very last step of that instruction

7. Initialize .env files for Frontend and Backend

   $ cp env .env; cp client/env client/.env

   You may need to add specific API keys (such as the GOOGLE_RECAPTCHA_SITE_KEY) to the .env files for testing specific features.

8. Open up 3 different terminals. On the terminal for Frontend in the client directory, run

   yarn build:development
   

   on the terminal for authentication service in the authentication directory, if you have not yet started Keycloak, run

   docker compose up
   

   or

   docker-compose up
   

   and on the terminal for Backend, run

   bundle exec rails s -p 3000
   

9. Access the App by visiting http://localhost:8080

10. You're all set! Simply login with the default username and password:

Email: test@example.org

Password: Coursemology!

Configuration

Multi Tenancy

To make sure that multi tenancy works correctly for you, change the default host in config/application.rb before deploying:

config.x.default_host = 'your_domain.com'

Opening Reminder Emails

Email reminders for items which are about to start are sent via a cronjob which should be run once an hour. See config/initializers/sidekiq.rb and config/schedule.yml for sample configuration which assumes that the Sidekiq and Sidekiq-Cron gems are used.

If you use a different job scheduler, edit those files so your favourite job scheduler invokes the ConsolidatedItemEmailJob job once an hour.

Found Boogs?

Create an issue on the Github issue tracker or come talk to us over at our Slack channels.

Contributing

We welcome contributions to Coursemology! Check out the issue tracker and pick something you'll like to work on. Please read our Contributor's Guide for guidance on our conventions.

If you are a student from NUS Computing looking for an FYP project, do check with Prof Ben Leong.

License

Copyright (c) 2015-2023 Coursemology.org. This software is licensed under the MIT License.

Using Coursemology

You're more than welcome to use Coursemology for your own school or organization. If you need more help, join our Slack channel to reach our core developers.

We are actively running Coursemology and can provide free use of our infrastructure on a case by case basis. Please contact Prof Ben Leong if you would like to explore this option.

Acknowledgments

The Coursemology.org Project was made possible by a number of teaching development grants from the National University of Singapore over the years. This project is currently supported by the AI Centre for Educational Technologies.