The road to COMP4020: Radical openness

18 Mar 26

comp4020

One thing which I’ve always tried to do in designing new university courses (something I’ve done about half-a-dozen times now) is make things as open as possible. This has meant things like:

• having the curriculum (and lecture videos) on a public-facing website under a CC licence rather than locked in the uni’s LMS
• writing up (and sticking to) detailed class policy documents so that the rules, expectations (and consequences for straying from them) are clearly explained to all students in advance
• making the end-of-class deliverable be a public performance/gig or gallery exhibition (especially for my Laptop Ensemble or Art & Interaction in New Media courses; in fact in those cases a public gig/exhibition is the most authentic assessment I could think of)

For COMP4020 I’m planning on continuing these practices. However, I’m thinking of ways I can push this openness even further. One thing I’m really keen on (and dovetails nicely with the studio crit-based core mechanic for the course) is the idea that the students share all of their weekly prototypes with each other. This means that they can visit the deployed version on the (public) web, but also the ability to clone the full source repo. including the full source code.

This means that if a student finds something cool (or has some notes) about another student’s web-based prototype they can (after the class) clone the repo themselves and poke around. I think that one of the weekly provocations will require this, actually: to take a different student’s previous prototype and remix it according to the next week’s provocation.

Because we already use a (self-hosted) GitLab server for all code submissions this should be fairly straightforward. I haven’t decided whether these submissions should be fully open (to the public) or just visible to other studnets in the class. In terms of the deployments, this is why I like the idea of lightweight VMs on the open web for all prototyping—the ability to “share the link with your mate or your Mum” comes for free.

These weekly prototype submissions aren’t marked directly; and I’m not sure if I’m going to require the same openness about the actual assessed deliverables (maybe not?). And we’ll need to have mechanisms in place to ensure studnets don’t accidentally commit API tokens or PII or anything else that shouldn’t be shared.

But the idea of a radically open community of students building and sharing what they’ve built is super appealing, and I’m keen to make it happen.

@online{swift2026radicalOpenness,
  author = {Ben Swift},
  title = {The road to COMP4020: Radical openness},
  url = {https://benswift.me/blog/2026/03/18/radical-openness/},
  year = {2026},
  month = {03},
  note = {AT-URI: at://did:plc:tevykrhi4kibtsipzci76d76/site.standard.document/2026-03-18-radical-openness},
}