Spotlight Course: Appsembler and CodeGrade Integration

One of the features that our developer marketing and training customers have been asking for is the ability to automate the code grading process. Without this functionality, they have to spend a lot of time, money, and resource grading learners’ work manually. This also makes it a lot more difficult to grade coding work at scale. Few companies have the capacity to manually grade all their learners’ work. 

In order to meet the needs of our customers, we used Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) to connect our online training platform Appsembler Tahoe with CodeGrade, which is a flexible learning platform and autograder for coding education.

We want to make customers aware of this important integration and the extra functionality it offers, as well as what the integration looks like in practice and how it will benefit their business. That’s why we have introduced an Integration Spotlight course that we offer through Appsembler Academy, which is where we offer our self-paced courses to help you learn about our products and how to create your own courses. 

We’ll walk you through the details of the integration and the accompanying course below. 

What Does the Appsembler Tahoe-CodeGrade Integration Do?

With the Tahoe-CodeGrade integration, learners submit their work through the Tahoe platform as normal and CodeGrade provides instant feedback on their coding. Learners can immediately see what they did right, get insight into what they need to improve, and resubmit their work for another round of instant grading. 

CodeGrade uses a rubric to automatically send the results of the work back to the grade center in Tahoe. CodeGrade also allows you to add snippets as inline comments, to stop you from having to type the same feedback over and over again. With peer feedback, learners can give their input into each other’s work. 

Other features include:

• Plagiarism detection
• Assignment analytics
• Custom roles and permissions
• RESTful API
• Hand in requirements

CodeGrade works with all programming languages.

To understand more about how CodeGrade works and see the autograding functionality in action, watch the video below.

How does the integration work?

CodeGrade integrates with Tahoe via the LTI Consumer XBlock, which is a component that can be added to courses to securely share learner data with third-party tools via the Learning Tools Interoperability standard. 

When a learner submits a code assignment, CodeGrade spins up an AutoTest VM which can run any combination of different types of tests, returning their grades to Tahoe once the code grading is complete.

What does the Tahoe-CodeGrade Integration Spotlight Course Involve?

Some Tahoe integrations are plug-and-play and don’t require a lot of explanation, but CodeGrade is a more involved and complex product. We created the integration spotlight course to make sure that everyone can understand how the integration works and get the most out of it. 

The course is divided into three sections:

• Introduction, which explains what CodeGrade does, its history, and why it was developed
• CodeGrade in Action, which explains how it works and provides a hands-on demo of the autograding with Python and Java, and case studies of CodeGrade in use at a teacherless course. You get two live examples of coding exercises in CodeGrade which you can try from the learner’s perspective. 
• Wrapping Up, which provides the opportunity to schedule a personalized demo of CodeGrade or Appsembler Academy 

The course — and Appsembler Academy — is open to everyone, not just existing Appsembler customers. So, if you want to try the course out to get a feel of what Tahoe can do, it only takes a few seconds to enroll. 

What’s Next?

We want our customers to get the most out of Appsembler Tahoe and the integrations that extend its functionality. With that in mind, we are planning to create more short integration spotlight courses that give you hands-on experience with third-party integrations and showcase what Tahoe can do.

We’ve just launched the Tahoe-CodeGrade course and it’s our first course of its kind, so if you have any feedback on which bits you find useful or what you’d like to see more of, let us know! 

Schedule a personalized demo of Appsembler Tahoe or CodeGrade.