Grav Helios Course Hub

Who It’s For

• Educators building a dedicated home for one or more courses
• Open publishers sharing learning resources and OER
• Individuals or teams that want a version-controlled, GitHub or Codeberg workflow

Built for Teaching and Learning

A single, well-organized home with a clear weekly structure – giving learners what they need and educators full control.

• Clear weekly structure – learners can orient quickly with a week-by-week flow
• One place for everything – courses, modules, lessons, resources, and updates stay organized
• Visual course identity – course cards with icons, images, instructor names, and status badges
• LMS-friendly embedding – a URL parameter displays only page content, and can adjust the Table of Contents
• Findable materials – search stays relevant to the current course, and can span courses when needed
• Scales from one course to many – run a single course site or manage multiple courses from one hub
• Open and constraint-free – publish openly, keep ownership of your content and files, and host it on almost any web server

What Sets It Apart

• LMS embedding without LTI – embed any page directly into Canvas, Moodle, or Brightspace with a URL parameter; no LTI setup, no plugin, no IT negotiation required
• Single or multi-course – share a direct link so students land on their course homepage; add more courses and a full course list becomes the homepage automatically
• Portable by design – your content is plain Markdown files in folders, not a database record; open it in any text editor or move it to another platform entirely
• Ready for the 5Rs, no extra step – plain Markdown means your content is already ready to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute
• Course-aware search – scopes to the current course when browsing within it, and spans all courses from the Courses homepage
• 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 a Course Hub starting point in minutes – upload your export and browse the resulting Markdown files directly, no Grav or Helios installation needed to see what carries over.

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
• Team-ready – multi-user editing with role-based access rights for team-managed course content
• Supports open-source sustainability – the Grav Premium Helios theme requires a license, and that revenue directly funds continued development of open-source Grav CMS

Why Grav?

A mature, stable platform that just completed its biggest release yet – Grav 2 brings a modern admin panel experience, 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.

What’s Included

• Home + overview pages
• Weekly modules and lessons
• Resource and expandable guide pages
• Topics index and announcement shortcode examples
• Documentation for facilitators and contributors