Via Sacha I found this really interesting post by John Kitchin, whose work Irreal has mentioned many times. In this post, Kitchin writes about how he used Emacs to run a graduate course in Chemical Engineering. Emacs was used to handle everything in the course.
When I say “everything,” I mean everything. As Kitchin says
Every lecture was given from Emacs, every assignment completed in Emacs, turned in from Emacs, graded in Emacs, returned in Emacs.
Kitchin provided each student with a custom Emacs environment that included all the tools he uses for interfacing with Python and for making engineering calculations. In addition, he included a package he calls techela that interfaces with git and handles student assignment submission, quiz and exam taking, retrieval of grades, and other similar chores.
Course administration generally takes a significant amount of a professor’s time. Kitchin’s set up eliminates much of the busy work. Read the post to get an idea of how pervasive Emacs was in the course. As usual, Kitchin exploits Emacs in novel ways that makes his work much easier.