Educational IT portfolio

The most widely used of our open-source and in-house services is the online learning platform A+, https://plus.cs.aalto.fi/. It is based on the Python Django web framework. A+ architecture is based on micro-services and it includes a number of side-tools. In addition to the Department of Computer Science, A+ is widely used at other schools in Aalto, and in addition to Aalto, A+ is used also in Tampere and Turku universities.

A+ microservices include

• Similarity and AI-assistance detection services for identifying fraud, of which Radar is in-house developed and Dolos an open-source project at Ghent University.
• Jutut provides teachers and students the opportunities to give and receive detailed and context-specific feedback during the course which in turn supports students in their studies.
• Neuvontajono (Lab queue) is a dedicated side-tool for being on the waiting list to get help in an exercise session. The service is also available in MyCourses via LTI.
• Koodisäilö (Code vault) is for students’ sharing their programming exercise solutions for TAs, as part of asking for help. The service is also available in MyCourses via LTI.

Jupyter.org is an internationally actively developed, Python-based open-source project for interactive computational notebooks. The "nbgrader" (github.com/jupyter/nbgrader) is a lightweight tool to distribute and autograde assignments in courses.

Jupyter.cs.aalto.fi is our local setup combining jupyter+nbgrader+Aalto account+Aalto storage. It has been in production since 2018 and is actively used in teaching in data-science type courses at our university. It includes the Jupyter Notebook/JupyterLab extension Nbgrader for assessment needs. We contribute to the international open-source community by submitting Nbgrader-related pull-requests upstream.

The in-house Ossi service aims to support teachers responsible for courses in the course grading process by collecting students’ points for assignments, projects and exams from multiple learning platforms and supporting in counting the course grades. It is developed in a Node.js and React based environment with Typescript, originally in a student SW project course, and after that as in-house development. Ossi is currently available only for Computer Science courses' teachers.

Sub-editor is designed as a side-tool for the media service Panopto which is the Aalto solution for the sharing lecturing videos. While Panopto provides the basic process for AI transcription and translation of videos, Sub-editor provides the user-friendly and effective way to edit the AI suggestions which typically require much editing. It is currently piloted with a small number of teachers at https://sub-editor.cs.aalto.fi/ . 

The PPC environment has been specifically designed for the Programming Parallel Computers course in collaboration between our department and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki.

Rubyric is the rubric-based manual assessment tool for teachers and TAs. It supports systematic feedback. Rubyric is available at https://rubyric.cs.aalto.fi/ and it can also be used in A+ via LTI.