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.

• 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. Group work is also possible if desired.

• Focus on helping students: Jump right into a student’s file at any time, see editing history, attract attention from a side chat.

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

• Access GPUs and other powerful machines: Use compute servers when standard project resources are not sufficient.

• Flexible billing: Pay for your students (with individual limits on compute servers) or let them pay for resources that you configure.

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!

• Overview
  • Setting up a Course
  • Assignments and Handouts
  • Working on Assignments
  • Extra Compute Resources
  • CoCalc Roadmap
  • Budgeting and Billing
• Creating a New Course
  • Create the Course Project
  • Add Instructors and TAs
  • Create the Course File
  • Multiple Sections
• Licensing Student Projects
  • Students Pay For Licenses
  • Institute Pays for Licenses
  • Teaching with Compute Servers
• Restrict Student Projects
• Add Students to the Course
• Student Projects
• Assignments and Handouts
  • Create a Handout
  • Distribute a Handout
  • Create an Assignment
  • Distribute an Assignment
  • Check “Student View”
  • Collect an Assignment
  • Grade an Assignment
  • Return an Assignment
  • Export Grades
• Collaboration
  • Look at Students Work
  • Edit Students Files
  • Side Chats and Mentions
  • Shared Project and Chat Rooms
  • Group Projects
• After the Course Ends
  • Remove License
  • Delete Student Projects
  • Student Account Access
• Using nbgrader
  • Show nbgrader UI
  • Create Questions
  • Student Version
  • Grading Process
• Peer Grading
• CoCalc for Short Training Sessions
  • After a Session is Done
  • Questions?
• nbgrader for R
  • How to setup nbgrader for CoCalc to work with R
  • How to prepare an assignment in CoCalc for R
• 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