Course shared project

What the shared project is

A course shared project is one ordinary CoCalc project that is shared with the whole course. Students, instructors, and TAs all get write access to the same project.

It is separate from each student's private course project. Use it when students should collaborate in a common workspace instead of each working in their own copy.

What happens when you create it

When you click Create Shared Project, CoCalc creates a new project with a course-specific title and description, saves its project id in the course settings, and configures collaborators.

The collaborator set is kept as:

• all collaborators on the instructor project that contains the course file
• all students in the course who have CoCalc accounts

Whenever the course is reopened or reconfigured, CoCalc tries to add missing course staff and students to the shared project. If the course is configured to disallow arbitrary extra collaborators, reconfiguration also removes people who are not course staff or students.

What gets synchronized

The shared project receives course metadata of type shared. Course datastore configuration and environment variables are pushed to it so shared-project software can see the same course-level settings that student projects see.

The shared project uses the same RootFS choice as new student projects. When an instructor applies a new course RootFS image to existing course projects, CoCalc also applies it to the shared project.

Student-project restrictions do not apply to the shared project. The shared project is intentionally collaborative and writable by everyone in the course.

Why it is useful

Use a shared project for:

• live in-class labs where everybody edits or runs code together
• a course-wide chat or scratch workspace
• shared datasets, examples, or notebooks students should experiment with
• demonstrations where students should see the same running files

Do not use it for private student submissions, grades, or work that must remain separate by student. Use assignments and student projects for that.

Resource planning

The shared project is a real project. If many students use it at once, it may need enough CPU, RAM, disk, and network capacity for the class activity. After creating it, consider assigning an appropriate membership, pay-as-you-go resources, or project host placement before class starts.