Codio and UC Berkeley
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Codio is the most effective solution
What we needed
Why we chose Codio
Teaching with Codio
Courses Taught With Codio
- Advanced Software Engineering
- Full-Stack Web Development
Student issues relating to installation, wrong versions of the development stack, etc., have disappeared. Sharing with other instructors is trivial and has encouraged them to adopt and adapt our materials and contribute to improving them.
Students can start working on complex assignments on day one with zero configuration. These issues seem obvious, and in introductory programming classes, they don't arise as often, but not having a good solution for these issues in a complex class like this one would be a showstopper.
Sophisticated auto-grading that's easy to configure
Working with Codio
Codio's support team is excellent. Because our TA's and instructors are technically competent when we actually do need support it tends to be a fairly specific and deep technical issue, and Codio has always been very responsive. Regarding our liaison Elise Deitrick, it feels like she's part of our extended course team.
Going forward
We are recommending Codio to other courses in our program as well. (Admittedly, our courses are huge, and it's often hard to dislodge existing solutions, but Codio feels best-of-breed to me).
Furthermore, all development of new assignments in our course will be done on Codio, and we are developing questions specifically for use on coding exams where students will be able to "buy a hint" (by giving up some number of points) on an exam question in order to continue on to later parts of the question. We prototyped this in a bespoke system a few years ago, but Elise has identified a way to do it using Codio.