Open Sourcing Pupilfirst: Our Journey
About Pupilfirst - the modern open source LMS
Pupilfirst is a modern open source LMS built around the philosophy that true learning cannot happen by just consuming information. It happens when students attempt relevant tasks and learn the theory around those tasks. Pupilfirst enables teachers to assess the learning of students by quickly, and efficiently reviewing the quality of task submissions by students. It also enables teachers to share feedback and create a conversation around what students have learned. The platform encourages collaboration by building student communities that can solve its own problems. The platform also supports teaming up of students to go through a challenging course together.
Pupilfirst was open-sourced in September 2019, and its codebase is available on Github. It is licensed using the permissive MIT license. All content residing in the docs/ directory of this repository is licensed under the Creative Commons: CC BY-SA 4.0 license. This documentation is available for easy viewing at this link. All third-party components incorporated into Pupilfirst are licensed under the original license provided by the owners of the applicable components.
Why did we open source Pupilfirst?
The case of public education
Our team’s vision is to transform the higher education landscape in India. We wish to address the industry-academia gap, a pressing problem in India, by partnering with industry-leaders and universities.
Universities across India, both public and private, offer industry-relevant electives in partnership with the Pupilfirst team. All of these electives offer course-credits to students which aid them in earning a degree. Thus, we’re very much involved in the space of public education in India. In this regulated space, we felt that the use of proprietary software would be counter-productive to the long-term health of the ecosystem.
Trust & transparency in development
The Pupilfirst platform’s overall goal has always been to make modern tooling available in the field of education, and to do so in a manner that promotes effective techniques for improving student outcomes. Going open-source allows our developers to be transparent about the work that we do, and the changes we’re making to the platform to aid that goal.
Developing in the open allows for easier communication between everyone involved, allowing the larger community, of both students and teachers, to participate in the development of the platform.
Processes, not just software
We’ve also always known that, in addition to the software that we’ve built, our team is valued for its partnerships, integrations and the processes that we’ve developed to deliver industry electives to students. This tightly integrated combination of software and processes is what gives our team its edge.
With each upgrade to the platform, we try to integrate what we’ve learned (our processes) into its features. We’ve also written down many of our insights in the documentation for the platform, so that more people can successfully use its features to deliver meaningful learning outcomes in their own domains and communities.
To know more about my experience helping students achieve real learning outcomes, find me on Twitter at @g3Mo or send me an e-mail.