For teachers

Your students, unstuck at 9 pm.

DIY Degree walks a student through the best free explanation of the exact topic they are on and checks that it landed. With a class, it shows you who is stuck, without a roster to upload or a grade to add to your book.

Open the app What you would see
What you can do

Built to make your day easier, and labelled honestly

DIY Degree augments your classroom; it does not replace it. Some of what follows is in the app today and some is built and waiting for its first classroom pilot. Each item says which.

Live
In the app at app.diydegree.org now.
Pilot
Built and tested, switched off in production until the first pilot.
Planned
Designed, not built yet.

  • Search by standard code

    Live

    Type a code the way your pacing guide prints it, in any spelling, and land on the topic aligned to it. Or browse a framework’s codes and the topics published under each. The graph is young, so coverage grows as the open commons does.

  • Recommend a resource for a topic

    Live

    Send the video or page that works in your room. A recommendation is never a student’s first pick until a person has reviewed it; before then it can appear as an alternative marked “recommended, not yet reviewed”.

  • Report anything wrong in one tap

    Live

    Every resource and every check question has a report button. A report of unsuitable material restricts the resource to adults at once, before anyone has reviewed it.

  • Assign topics, not a course

    Pilot

    An assignment is a set of topics. It shows on each student’s Today screen labelled with your class and steers what comes next. It enforces nothing and penalises nothing.

  • See your class as states

    Pilot

    Not started, in progress, mastered or stuck, per student, on the topics you assigned and nothing else. Stuck means two checks on the topic have not gone their way, which is the moment you can help.

  • Standards coverage and a states export

    Pilot

    See which codes in a framework your assignments cover, and download the class table as CSV or JSON. Every export says “not a grade of record”, because it is not one.

  • Office hours for your class

    Planned

    Set free office hours. A student who is stuck at home taps “get help”, joins a short queue, and works through the exact topic and check with you, inside the app. Free for your own class, no recording.

What we will never do

The list we are proudest of

Each of these is a rule the app is built around, not a setting someone can switch on later.

  • No gradebook

    The app is not a system of record, and nothing in it pretends to be.

  • No numeric scores

    You see a state per topic. Scores stay with the student.

  • No time-on-task reports

    How long a student spent, or when, is never shown to you.

  • No leaderboards

    No class ranking and no comparing one student’s progress with another’s.

  • No reading their conversations

    What a student says to the guide is theirs.

  • No roster upload

    Students join by a code they type. You never create an account for anyone.

  • No school pricing

    Classes are free and no class feature will ever sit behind a fee.

How a student joins Built, in pilot

By a code you share, and on their say-so

There is no roster and no teacher-created account. A student types your class code, sees exactly what you will see before agreeing, and can leave at any time. The app is for people aged 13 and over.

  1. You share a code. Eight characters, good for 30 days, and you can replace it whenever you like.
  2. They see both lists below before they agree. If the wording ever changes, they are asked again rather than signed up to terms they have not seen.
  3. They can leave whenever they want. Leaving needs no reason and takes effect straight away: from that moment you see nothing.

What you will see

  • Whether each assigned topic is not started, in progress, mastered or stuck
  • The date they mastered an assigned topic
  • Their handle if they chose one, otherwise a label for your class only

What you will never see

  • Their XP, level or streak
  • How long they spent, or when
  • Their check answers or scores
  • Anything they said to the guide
  • Any topic you did not assign
  • Their email, their age, or their name unless they told you
  • Their devices or where they signed in
Privacy in one paragraph

Less data than a worksheet

A student gives a birth year, not a birthday, and no name is required. Nothing is sold, there is no advertising, and nothing a student writes is used to train an AI model, ours or anyone else’s. Every learner can download their data, or delete their account, from Settings. We will publish a Parents’ Bill of Rights and link it from this page once it exists, and not before. The detail is in the privacy policy.

Contribute

Your judgment, in the commons

The topics, alignments and resource ratings DIY Degree uses live in OpenDegree, an open commons. What you contribute belongs to the commons under CC BY-SA 4.0, credited to your handle if you want the credit.

  • Recommend a resource

    Live

    From any topic in the app. Recommendations join the review queue with every other request for the same link counted, so a curator confirms rather than hunts.

  • Suggest an alignment

    Planned

    Tell the commons which standard a topic serves, or which topic a code is missing, through OpenDegree’s contributor app.

  • Rate what worked

    Planned

    Thumbs on a resource are live in the app today. Rating a resource in the commons, for quality and for audience, comes with OpenDegree’s contributor app.

See the commons at opendegree.org.

Build your own course

Want to author, not assign?

DIY Degree is for teaching through the open graph with the best resources that already exist. If you want to write your own course and own it, that is what InstructOS, another eCollective tool, is for.