Optivem School

An open-source, GitHub-backed learning platform for guided practice: students submit sandbox projects and ask questions, teachers review and mark progress — all scoped by course enrollment.

Status: early / work in progress. v1 is being built.

What it is

Optivem School turns a GitHub repo into a structured learning platform with three roles:

Role	Can do
Student	Ask questions · submit a project review request · track their progress — scoped to enrolled courses
Teacher (reviewer)	Answer questions · review submissions · move status → completed
Administrator	Manage the roster, courses, projects, and enrollment

The signature loop is submit → review → complete, tracked per student. It is a structured learning platform (guided practice with expert review), not a casual community.

How it works (GitHub-native)

It's config-driven and built on primitives GitHub already provides — no bespoke backend:

• Config (config/*.json) — students, teachers/reviewers, projects, courses, board.
• Submissions = GitHub Issues via generated per-course issue templates.
• Status = a GitHub Projects v2 board (Open · In Progress · In Review · Done).
• Automation = GitHub Actions — validate submissions, dedupe, add to the board, transition status.
• Read surface = a generated static dashboard (a courses × projects progress matrix).

This mirrors the model proven in Optivem's own learning hub.

The two configurable lists

Each deployment owns who participates — these are plain config you edit:

• config/students.json — the student roster (github handle + name).
• config/reviewers.json — the teacher/reviewer list (can review any project).

See config/README.md for the full schema and the other config files (projects.json, courses/*.json, board.json).

Deploy your own (no fork required)

Optivem School is a GitHub template repo — click “Use this template” to get your own independent repo (not a fork), then:

1. Edit config — copy each config/*.example.json → config/*.json and fill in your roster, projects, courses. Validate with npm run config:check.
2. Create a GitHub Projects v2 board and record its IDs in config/board.json.
3. Enable GitHub Actions in your repo (the workflows automate submissions + status).
4. Host the dashboard — see below.

Hosting

The dashboard shows private student data, so it must be gated — and on the GitHub Free plan, Pages won't serve a private repo. So:

• Cloudflare Pages serves the generated static dashboard (works from a private repo, free).
• Cloudflare Access (free Zero Trust) gates it to an allow-list by email / GitHub — no custom auth.
• Point a subdomain at it with a single CNAME at your DNS provider.

Development

npm run config:check    # validate config/*.json and print a summary

Requires Node ≥ 20. No build step.

License

AGPL-3.0-or-later. Contributions require agreeing to the CLA — see CONTRIBUTING.md.