Ask HN: Looking for a simple solution for building an online course

I don't think I've ever heard of the ability to have students upload code and then run that code securely described as "basic functionality" before.

I could write a novel about this because I've been creating courses since 2015 but I'm going to keep it short.

I've tried a lot of platforms and teachable.com is by far the best solution as of today if you don't have a requirement where you expect people to upload code and then run automated tests against it.

I currently use thinkific.com for my courses because over a year ago I made that decision and switching between platforms is too painful for your users (they would need to make a new account, lose their progress and potentially lose invoice data, etc.). I will move off Thinkific in the future, but that's not going to happen until I finish building my own platform (which I'm currently doing at the moment as a side project mainly because as a developer, I'm still at my happiest when I'm writing code).

With that said, I also use Teachable for another project and the UI is a million times ahead of where Thinkific is for both instructors and students. Every time I use Teachable I'm upset that I chose to use Thinkific initially.

At the bare minimum you'll have to assemble your course, pick a theme for the front end, and build up your course's description page.

Expect to pay $100 / month for most platforms.

Why are you writing your own solution? Is it just for fun?

I was under impression that there are tons of opensource available platforms to host courses.

At KIT they use Praktomat: https://github.com/KITPraktomatTeam/Praktomat/

GitHub plus Travis CI is not enough?

Strong recommend for Autolab as well. In addition to the features above. Front end is also easily extensible for custom activities.

Behind the scenes of course, are Docker multi-stage builds for submitted code. And I dare say, if your class is http://autolab.github.io/2015/05/autolab-and-docker/