The online grading and code review system demonstrated by Greg Wilson‘s students from the University of Toronto is really cool, and the kind of thing I'd love to see open-sourced and spread. I know my alma mater would find it handy!

Things I particularly like about it:

• You can highlight a region and attach either a predefined comment or a new comment.
• The support for rubrics makes grading much easier and more consistent.

Hmm, maybe the student view can be improved by making it easier for students to see all their projects.

Suggestions:

• Per project views, etc.
• Accessibility guidelines
• Downloadable spreadsheets
• Usable for code reviews for open source projects? Won't be grading, of course, but interesting for annotation…

The developers said that Turbogears made development much easier. One of the biggest challenges that faced them was cross-browser Javascript. Another is that the school uses a different authentication system (Kerberos) than the one used by Turbogears.

Random Emacs symbol: nnvirtual-find-group-art – Function: Return the real group and article for virtual GROUP and ARTICLE.