Mechanical MOOC documentation¶

Quickstart¶

The Mechanical MOOC is a Django application. This quickstart will show you how to deploy the Mechanical MOOC to heroku. To complete this quickstart you will need to use the linux command line.

Set up a heroku account and install the heroku toolbelt.

Get the code from github:

git clone https://github.com/p2pu/mechanical-mooc

change into the source directory and run:

heroku create

Set the django SECRET_KEY by running:

heroku config:set SECRET_KEY="`uuidgen | md5pass`"

Next push the application code to heroku:

git push heroku master

Then add the free development database and create the database tables:

heroku addons:add heroku-postgresql:dev
heroku run python manage.py syncdb --migrate

During the database creation, you need to create a superuser. This is the user that you will use to log in and create and send emails. Be sure to remember the credentials and don’t make them admin:password!!

And finally, to open the Mechanical MOOC in your browser run:

heroku open

Design your course¶

The Mechanical MOOC is built around the idea that the web is a pretty good platform and that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Because of that approach using the Mechanical MOOC for a course will require using multiple tools for the different pieces of a big open online course.

The landing page. The Mechanical MOOC gives you a place where you can tell people what your course is about. If you use the recommended deployment method this page should be able to hold up to reasonably high spikes in traffic.

Signup. This is also part of the Mechanical MOOC. Users sign up right on the landing page, fill in some info if you want and then they are watching Vanilla Ice! Nice!

Sending emails. The next bit the Mechanical MOOC does for you is send out emails to everyone who signed up for a course. You can author your emails in a WYSIWYG editor and schedule them to be delivered in the future.

The content. While it is possible to put some content on the Mechanical MOOC itself, this hasn’t been the way we used it, most content lived on other platforms. For the content you need to host, you can use a tool like WordPress or GithubPage.

The community. The Mechanical MOOC gives you some tools to help users establish identity in your course in the form of a collaborative class photo. But hosting the community is best done using an existing social media site. We’ve used Google+, Twitter, SoundCloud and OpenStudy in the past. The right tool will depend on the community you are targeting and what they are comfortable with. You may end up using more that one tool.

There are many other good tools that you can use that will depend on the way your course is set up and the topic of your course. We’ve used online sound editing tools, online coding sites and a few other tools in a bunch of different courses.

If running your course like this makes sense to you, you should proceed with setting up the Mechanical MOOC. You can find instructions on how to do that here. If you need assistance with this, you can reach out to us for help, advice on this thread in the P2PU forum.

Setting up the Mechanical MOOC¶

If you followed the instructions in the quick start you will have a basic runnig example of the Mechanical MOOC, but you won’t be able to send out emails, it will run at a subdomain at heroku and all the content will still be the example content.

heroku config:set MAILGUN_API_KEY=<api-key>
heroku config:set MAILGUN_API_DOMAIN=<your-domain>

heroku config:set DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL=mooc@example.net

heroku addons:add scheduler:standard

heroku config:set MOOC_DOMAIN=<your-domain>

heroku config:set MAILGUN_API_DOMAIN=<your-domain>

heroku run python manage.py shell
> from sequence import models
> from datetime import datetime
> start_date = datetime(2013, 12, 1)
> signup_close_date = datetime(2013, 11, 23)
> models.create_sequence(start_date, signup_close_date)
> exit()

Customize site¶

To customize the landing page, you need to edit templates/signup/index.html. This page includes the form used during signup. You can customize the questions whithout needing to modify the Python code, but be sure to put in unique names for every field you add and to validate anything that needs validation on the client side. The only field that you cannot remove is the timezone field.

To customize the welcome email sent to users, edit the three files in templates/signup/emails/.

The content that lives in the about and FAQ links at the top lives in templates/about.html and templates/faq.html respectively.

To edit the topnav, update:

<div class="nav-collapse collapse">
    <ul class="nav main-menu">
        <li><a class="home" href="{% url 'home' %}"><i class="icon-home"></i></a></li>
        <li><a href="{% url 'faq' %}">FAQ</a></li>
        <li><a href="http://mechanicalmooc.wordpress.com">Blog</a></li>
        <li><a href="{% url 'about' %}">About</a></li>
    </ul>
</div>

in templates/base.html.

Configure class photo (optional)¶

The MechanicalMOOC supports a light weigth method for users to put a face to their participation.

heroku config:set AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=<aws_access_key>
heroku config:set AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=<aws_secret_key>
heroku config:set AWS_S3_BUCKET=<bucket-name>

heroku config:set TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN=<access-token>
heroku config:set TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET=<access-token-secret>
heroku config:set GOOGLE_PLUS_API_KEY=<api-key>

Grouping users¶

Creating, scheduling and sending emails¶

Dump data after the MOOC¶