polyglot

Polyglot

Unified, libre interface to learning management systems

The problem

"Digital classrooms" are increasingly popular. Ethical software, used appropriately, can be beneficial in schools. Unfortunately, educational software today is fragmented and proprietary, a problem which has been covered before. In an era where student privacy is trampled, this is particularly unacceptable. To add insult to injury, the relevant proprietary programs do not even interoperate with each other; in extreme cases, students may need to use upwards of a dozen proprietary systems merely to complete their coursework.

The solution

Enter Polyglot (name very tentative). Polyglot is free software to interface with each educational platform, so as to unify them and avoid proprietary components. Polyglot is to education as Pidgin is to chat and youtube-dl is to streaming.

Supported services (in order of support)

• SchoolLoop: grades, task lists, LoopMail (todo: upload, forums, etc)
• Haiku / PowerSchool Learning: modules, forums (todo: quizzes, upload, etc.)
• Email: sending, receiving (todo: threading, MIME types, attachments, etc)
• Moodle: fetch resource lists, classes, and grade summaries (todo: quizzes, wrap links, lots of bug fixes, etc.)
• Canvas: fetch classes and grade summaries (todo: everything)
• Webassign: downloading problem sets (todo: submission, fancy problems)
• Classroom: fetch classlist (todo: everything)

Bold indicates that I currently use this backend with Polyglot in production so you can bug me over email if it breaks (alyssa@rosenzweig.io).