Instructor Guide

There are several reasons why you should consider conducting a course on CoCalc:

• Managed platform: no time is wasted setting up, maintaining, backing up and securing a flaky platform. Instead, you can sleep while CoCalc ensures everything runs smoothly 24/7.

• Focus on helping students: Jump right into a student’s file and assist via a chat on the side.

• Proven track record: CoCalc is used for teaching since 2013 in hundreds of courses by tens of thousands of students.

• Student work is isolated: Each student does course work in a separate project.

• Control AI usage: Turn off AI integration for students, enable it only for basic troubleshooting, or leave the full integration - you decide.

Hint

While the intention of this Instructor Guide is to cover all course management functionality in detail, its complementary Student Guide is kept short and simple, emphasizing the most important points for students, e.g. to make sure they are using the right email address. Please consider linking to it in your syllabus!

• Creating a New Course
  • Create the Course Project
  • Add Teaching Assistants to the Course Project
  • Create the Course File
  • Add Students to the Course
  • What do the Students Get?
  • Reconfigure Student Projects
  • Resend outstanding email invites
• Upgrading Student Projects
  • Students Pay For Upgrades
  • Teacher or Institute Pays for Upgrades
  • Problems with Licenses
  • Adding Capacity
  • Teaching with Compute Servers
  • Charges for Paid LLMs
• Restrict Student Projects
• Course Management
  • Create a New Handout
  • Create a New Assignment
  • Distribute an Assignment
  • Check “Student View”
  • Collect an Assignment
  • Grade an Assignment
  • Return an Assignment Without Grading
  • Export Grades
  • Return an Assignment
• Collaboration
  • Real-time chatrooms
  • Live collaborative editing
  • @-Mention collaborators in chat
  • Shared Project
  • Group Projects
• After the Course Ends
  • Hide or Delete Student Projects
  • Remove License or Upgrades from Student Projects
  • Student Access After Course Ends
• FAQ, Tips and Tricks
  • Delete and undelete students
  • Delete and undelete assignments
  • Delete and undelete handouts
  • Empty trash: remove deleted objects from course file
  • Convert student notebooks to pdf for export
  • Copy missing files to a student project
  • Export student file use
  • Text fields generally support Markdown and LaTeX
  • Making multiple assignment folders quickly
  • Starting up everyone’s project before class
  • Restarting a project
  • Using Git
  • Time Travel Diffs
  • Run Terminal command in all student projects
  • How exactly are Assignments copied to students?
  • Invite Students Without Having Their Email Addresses
  • Verifying Student Activity
  • Moodle integration
  • Change the due date of an assignment
  • Account management, restrictions, and Single-Sign-On
• Peer Grading
• Teaching with nbgrader
  • Purpose of nbgrader
  • CoCalc nbgrader
  • Create an assignment folder
  • Start a Jupyter notebook for the assignment
  • Create questions
  • Generate student version of the notebook
  • Notebook table of contents
  • Distribute the assignment to students
  • Students complete the assignment
  • Collect the assignment
  • Option: Skip entering grades
  • Run nbgrader
  • Do manual grading and add instructor comments
  • Option: Sync grades
  • Return the assignment
• nbgrader for R
  • How to setup nbgrader for CoCalc to work with R
  • How to prepare an assignment in CoCalc for R
• CoCalc for Short Training Sessions
  • After a Session is Done
  • Questions?
• Upgrading Student Projects (legacy version)
  • Teacher or institution pays for upgrades