I decided to break my own standard methodology for this assignment, and play around with other people’s code. Mainly on the basis that online learning management tools are nothing new, and I am personally quite ignorant of what goes into them, the planning, the architecture, etc. By that rationale, I wanted to explore a few opensource platforms.
My number one pick, after a bit of research, was to dive into Stanford’s new opensource online learning tool, Class2Go. Since this is also my semester of Python, it seemed logical. The challenge to this over the past week, however, presented in how incredibly technical, obtuse, and complicated it is to set up a production environment. I was successful, ultimately, to get an instance up and running on Amazon’s EC2 virtual cloud, but it is running on a dev-based script so it’s uptime is not 100%. The goal for this week is to complete the functionality of this. So close, yet so far. 
Pick number two was to dive into Google’s opensource edu solution, which is a tool called CourseBuilder. I was successful launching this instance, which you can find here: http://itp2go.appspot.com/
But the basic idea that I’m going with in this pursuit, is to springboard off of this concept of the online classroom/offline community hybrid. I want to create the prototype of ITP2Go. Which will ideally serve as a repository for this semester’s projects, ultimately offering a full-featured online environment for supporting an offline classroom experience.