Helpful Tools
I have found the following tools very helpful. Some I have created, but all are free for UVA instructors. Most are free to everyone.
Course Management
- Collab, UVA’s course management system
- handles annoucement emails, posting and submission of assignments, and gradebook maintenance
- has the ability to provide discussion boards, quizzes, and more
- Github repositories for shared websites
- to handle shared editing and posting of the course website, including lecture notes, schedule, and contact information
- can be integrated into Collab via an iFrame
- Dropbox
- for sharing lecture content
- Github repository
- sharing course content privately with other instructors
- works well for code-based and text-based assignments, avoids conflicts from Dropbox
Discussion
- Piazza
- a discussion board system for students and course staff to interact, usually for quick homework and course questions
- has the ability to provide more course management (except grades)
- Slack
- communication among course staff
- has the ability to facilitate student discussion
- Discord
- communication among students, course staff,
- has the ability to facilitate student discussion
- more fine-grained controls than Slack
- the ability to share screen and join voice chats
Grading
- Online coding exam tool
- A tool I created to handle syntax-highlighted online exams
- compatible with UVA’s Collab interface
- provides support for TAs to grade questions individually at random
- TPEGS, a UVA paper-exam grading software
- to grade paper in-class exams and content
- A PDF grading software I developed to handle dividing the grading between TAs more easily than using Collab’s native interface
- JPLAG
- A plagiarism detection tool capable of testing .tex, .java, and .py submissions
Video Production
- Panopto, UVA’s vendor for online videos
- houses lecture videos, which we have recorded live every class session
- OBS - Open Broadcaster Studio
- Pitivi - Open-source video editing