Support for one instructor in charge of multiple courses

Hello,

Recently our team started to use Nbgrader with JupyterHub. We are thinking of a future case where a single teacher or instructor will be in charge of multiple courses and we can’t find a way of having one single account across all the courses, so the teacher can manage all assignments without having to use multiple accounts.

For example, we have two mock courses, course1 and course2, and we have instructor1 that manages both of them. We followed this information: Example Use Case: One Class, Multiple Graders and we came to the conclusion that for the instructor to able to manage both courses the only way was to manually edit nbgrader_config.py located in his home directory. We edit:

c.Exchange.course_id = "course1"
c.CourseDirectory.root = '/JupyterHub/grader-course1/course1'

And we change course1 for course2.

Is there a smarter way to do this? We could collaborate to make this feature if necessary 😃

Operating system

Ubuntu 18.04

nbgrader --version

Python version 3.6.5 |Anaconda, Inc.| (default, Apr 29 2018, 16:14:56) 
[GCC 7.2.0]
nbgrader version 0.5.4

jupyterhub --version (if used with JupyterHub)

0.8.1

jupyter notebook --version

5.5.0

[jhamrick]

It sounds like there is a lot of interest in having the formgrader support multiple classes, so perhaps it is worth considering adding this feature—though it will be a substantial amount of work, as all of nbgrader’s machinery currently makes a strong assumption that the course directory manages exactly one course. I unfortunately don’t have the bandwidth at the moment to implement something like that, though if someone wants to try to take a stab at it I can give pointers 🙂

In the meantime @sgvasquez there isn’t a way to have the same formgrader work with multiple classes, though as described in the docs you mentioned you can run multiple formgraders (one per class) which the same instructor has access to. That instructor can access the formgrader for a particular class at the url /services/<service-name>, such as /services/formgrader-course101 or /services/formgrader-course123.

[sivasquez]

Hello! I’m working with @FranLucchini with JHub and Nbgrader. The case we are currently working on is when a grader wants to create, release and collect assignments for two (or more) different courses he/she is in charge of. Currently in the Formgrader tab we are able to do actions on assignments on only one course, the one that is currently defined in nbgrader_config.py, inside the grader’s home directory.

We’d like to make it so a grader can chose which course he/she can act on, preferable via browser, and that’s what we are failing to see right now.

Is there any configuration we are misreading, or perhaps there is another option we have to enable?

Also, in the Example Use Case: Multiple Classes it’s specified that we need to write in the config file a root variable that points to the directory in where the course can be found. How do we do when we want to specify different paths for different courses?

Thanks a lot!