Cactus Courseware

A wonderful way to design and publish open-source online courses.

Comment

Inspiration

New technologies appear every day, but they are often inaccessible to people who don’t aren’t connected to someone knowledgeable or are not in a university covering the course. Self-taught options are unstandardized and difficult to improve. We decided that open-source education was the future of online courses, and created an online platform where people could publish courses hosted on Github repositories.

What it does

  • The Cactus CourseWare Team developed a full-stack web application that allows creators, teachers, and developers to upload open-source educational materials to the public.
  • These courses are then exposed using an accessible search for users to find courses they are interested in.
  • Courses are rendered in the application with functionality for traditional content, embeddable animations, multiple choice / multiple select questions, and community-sourced explanations
  • Curated resources are updated daily and can be retrieved from popular knowledge databases.

How we built it

  • Frontend: Typescript, React, ReMark, TailwindCSS, MaterialUI
  • Backend: Node.js, Express, Mongo.db, Mongoose ORM
  • Data Population: BeautifulSoup to scrape data from Wikipedia and generate sample tutorials.
  • Hosting on Heroku, Vercel.
  • Domain registration with Google.
  • Developed through lots of experimentation with the Github API.

Challenges we ran into

  • Getting rate limited by GitHub
  • Figuring out how to connect the backend to the frontend
  • Sharing information between components
  • Figuring out how to render markdown documents in react with custom syntax.
  • Last evening at 5:00 PM, Heroku stopped GitHub deploy support, breaking out automated deploy workflow for our backend REST API. Multiple hours were spent circumventing this with a custom build and deploy.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • It works! After iterating upon the material UI specification, we were able to design and implement custom web design using react and Figma.
  • We’re pleased with the look of the product.

What we learned

  • How to connect a MongoDB and node backend to a react frontend.
  • The principles of artistic design
  • Tailwind will destroy your styles
  • How to interface with the github API
  • How to render markdown dynamically in react.

What's next for Cactus CourseWare

  • Future development would include making it easier to convert repos to the format our website expects.
  • Adding more functionality, like progress tracking, community forums, etc.
  • Encouraging course developers to upload produce content to post on our website

Built With

Share this project:

Updates