Courseware as Code: Instituting Agile Courseware Collaboration
Julianna Rodriguez, Benjamin J. Allison, Christopher Apsey, Todd M. Boudreau · IEEE Security & Privacy · 2020
In 2014, the Secretary and Chief of Staff of the Army established the Cyber branch and the U.S. Army Cyber School (USACyS). Quickly building USACyS from scratch required building courseware to fill workforce-oriented curricula. Before we could finish creating sufficient and suitable content, the Army assigned students and scheduled classes. As we worked rapidly to create content, we turned to cloud-hosted storage and synchronization options. However, we found storage options for nonmarkup-language files could not support a managed workflow of creation, sharing, review, and approval. We struggled with an appropriate access control method to enable contributions from a diverse set of authors including faculty, contractors, and even students themselves. We had already chosen to use a privately hosted instance of GitLab for our virtual training infrastructure configuration, and we began to realize the potential of this type of version control repository for courseware. Through Git, we applied the "everything as code" concept to our courseware.