Get Involved

Welcome to the A+ LMS Community! By joining our team, you will be part of making the future education better than ever before! You will meet new friends, learn new skills and make a difference to thousands of students and teachers. This page will link to useful resources, which should help you get started.

We want to make sure that the community remains a welcoming and friendly place where people can feel comfortable, what ever their status is; old developers, new exited contributors, and not so technical people all should feel welcome! We ask you to check some friendly documents about code of conduct, while we lack our own:

Do not forget the code of conduct of your local organisation! Here are links to some:

As always, you are welcome to join our mailing list to receive announcements on new features. If needed, apluslms@googlegroups.com reaches also the core team of developers. You are also welcome to join any of our events (typically advertised in chat and to staff in universities using the platform). Like wise, you are welcome to join our community chat in apluslms.slack.com (if you don’t have pre-authorized email, send mail to the mailing list above).

The rest of the page describes many different ways you may contribute. None is more valuable than the other and big and small contributions are all welcome!

Issue reporting

If you have found a problem with a piece of the A+ LMS software or have an idea for an improvement, report it to the developers! Quality, usability and accessibility are import parts of our products, and you can be involved in an effort to make sure that our users are happy with the final products.

If you know the affected component, then report the issue directly to the issue tracker of the project. If you are unsure, you can use the issue tracker of the A+ portal.

Bug triaging

If you are interested to make the software even better, but you are no ready to be a programmer, then you could help with our issues. You can go through our issues and add argumented opinions, check if you can reproduce problems, or if an issue is already reported. Any help is welcome!

Development

By becoming a developer in the community, you change daily life for students and teachers alike. There are smaller and bigger tasks available, so you do not need to be experienced programmer to start developing for our projects! In the process you will learn more and become an experienced in many areas.

You can start by joining the community chat or browsing through interesting components. Many repositories contain issues tagged as a “good first issue”, which are a good starting point!

As a developer, you should familiarize yourself with our style guides.

Git pull-request workflow

Translation

Are you fluent in multiple languages? Or even good in English and Finnish? By contributing your translations of the text in the user interfaces of A+ LMS, you can make it more pleasant for you to use, and every other person using it. If you are interested, be in touch in our chat! Our list of frequently used translations may be helpful when improving translations or when creating course content.

Visual and Human Interface Design

Whether you are an artist, a designer, or just someone with an interest in how regular people interact with software, you are welcome to help us make the user experience even better! We are always in demand of new visual elements, where those images, symbols, or user interface elements. Or are you enthusiastic about accessibility? Our software can always be more accessible. In any case, you are welcome help us improve the software for everyone, as it’s not just for programmers!

Documentation

Even with the best-designed software, users will need documentation to help them do what they want and get the most out of it. Specially our teachers have a limited amount of time to find out how things work by themselves, and also course assistants change yearly. We value a good-quality documentation, and those who write it. Feel free to contribute to any of the following documentation resources. Your work has one of the biggest impacts to end-users.