Grav Open Course Hub

Who It’s For

• Educators building a dedicated home for a course, or for several
• Instructors who want course content they can reuse from term to term, outside the LMS
• Anyone who wants a free, fully open-source course site with no licence to buy
• Individuals or teams that want a version-controlled, GitHub or Codeberg workflow

Built for Teaching and Learning

A single, well-organized course home – giving learners what they need each week, and educators full control.

• A clear weekly focus – a Home page with “What’s Happening This Week” reminders, and modules or weekly units
• One place for everything – a course blog with tags, archives & RSS, plus schedule, topics, resources and syllabus pages
• Findable materials – course search (the / key jumps to it) and an A–Z topics index
• Learning content built in – course content blocks such as Learning Objectives and Key Takeaways, GitHub-style alerts, badges and groups on module cards, and image captions
• Rich embeds – Google Slides, H5P, PDF and link preview embeds, an optional news feeds page, and images readers can tap to see larger
• A look in your course colour – the 2026 Modern style with a tinted NavBar, optional Dark Mode, and English, French and German
• Open and constraint-free – publish openly, show a Creative Commons license, and host it on almost any web server

What Sets It Apart

• LMS embedding without LTI – embed any page in Canvas, Moodle or Brightspace with a URL parameter; no LTI setup or plugin needed
• Moves to Premium Helios later – the same course content shortcodes, alerts and card fields as Grav Helios Course Hub, so content can move there with a few adjustments
• Portable by design – your content is plain Markdown files in folders, not a database record
• Ready for the 5Rs, no extra step – plain Markdown means your content is already ready to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute
• No build pipeline – edit in the browser-based Admin panel or via Git; changes go live immediately

Migrating an existing Canvas, Moodle, Brightspace, or Blackboard course? The companion Common Cartridge Converter (Beta) turns a Common Cartridge (.imscc) export into Open Course Hub modules, or a whole course for Open MultiCourse Hub – see an example conversion.

Write Your Course in Markdown, Keep Your LMS

The Course Hub is not a learning management system. It holds your course content as Markdown files that you own and version with Git, while your LMS keeps handling enrollment, grading, and assessment.

• Markdown content, outside the LMS – write and revise in plain Markdown files, then reuse them from term to term, or across Canvas, Moodle, and Brightspace
• Embed any page in your LMS – a URL parameter displays only the page content, with text you can show only on the site or only when embedded
• Moving an existing course – the Common Cartridge Converter (beta) above carries an LMS export across as Markdown

Several Courses? Grav Open MultiCourse Hub

The same Course Hub structure, plus a homepage of course cards for managing several courses from one site – each course with its own look, and content you can share between them.

• Each course its own site – its own navigation, header image, sidebar, footer, NavBar colour and favicon
• Organised its own way – by modules, with a course blog, or by weekly units
• Shared content – share any page or section between courses with the included Page Inject plugin
• Search each course – with an optional all-courses search on the homepage

Behind the Scenes

• No database, no complexity – content runs on simple text files, easier to back up, version control, and migrate than database-driven platforms
• Open collaborative authoring – Git Sync with “Edit this Page” links for open, collaborative course content
• Free and open source – MIT licensed, on the free Bootstrap4 Open Matter theme; runs on Grav 2 (PHP 8.3+), with a Grav 1.7 version (PHP 8.0.2+)

Why Grav CMS?

A mature, stable platform that just completed its biggest release yet – Grav 2 brings the completely new Admin 2 panel, a built-in API, AI-ready content and workflows, and support for the latest PHP versions. File-based content you fully control, no database required, and updates go live immediately with no build process required. Ten years on, 15.7k+ GitHub stars, and built for what’s next.

On Grav 2, even this free project gets the completely new Admin 2 panel, a built-in API and support for the latest PHP versions.

What’s Included

• A Home page with this week’s reminders, and example modules
• A course blog, plus schedule, topics, resources and syllabus pages
• An example UX Techniques Guide and an optional news feeds page
• A Read Me page describing every setting