Followup to Cory Bart's update on CSSPLICE's main list

[Igor dos Santos Montagner]

Dear All,

I have just received Cory Bart's update on the packaging working group and I have seen a lot of similarities to what we're doing at INSPER in the Computer Engineering course. In a nutshell, we have developed a similar way of packaging course materials using MkDocs and github repositories. We're mostly Python guys, so it was a more natural choice to us than Jekyll. Either way,  you can see below some examples of courses (in portuguese) using this format. These were developed by 3 different instructors (myself included), so the format is somewhat different.

• https://insper.github.io/supercomp/
• https://insper.github.io/ComputacaoEmbarcada/
• https://insper.github.io/design-de-software/
• https://insper.github.io/dev-aberto/

Anyways, we would like to know if we could join the WG in these efforts. We have experience creating these publicly available materials and even added some dynamic elements (lecture slides linked in the handouts and dynamically generated pages when building). It would be a pleasure to contribute with the work being done in the WG.

Best Regards,

Igor Montagner

[William Billingsley]

Dear All

Happy New Year. 

In the spirit of giving New Year updates on our work in this space, I thought I'd link to a paper I presented to ASCILITE (the Australasian technology in higher education conference) in December. 

https://2020conference.ascilite.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ASCILITE-2020-Proceedings-Billingsley-W.pdf

ASCILITE have had some delays getting their edited proceedings out (hence the "draft" markings they've put on the papers), but the conference has taken place.

I find there tends to be a split between the CS-education community (computer scientists) and the learning technologies community (largely non-CS academics and greater involvement by universities' central teaching & learning strategy units). ASCILITE is mostly non-CS academics, and this year the conference was being cohosted by UNE's School of Education and our Learning and Teaching Transformations centre. So, this was a position paper to a mostly non-CS audience pitching our approach to continuously deployed courses that are replete with interactive components.

cheers

Will Billingsley

[Cory Bart]

Thanks William and Igor! I'm glad to hear you're excited to join our efforts! We hope you'll continue to update us, and at some point later this year perhaps we can schedule a meeting and compare notes on these different approaches. I know we're very excited to also be exploring Kevin Lin's implementation. I see differences in everyone's approach, but it's also encouraging to see the alignment between the efforts. I feel like the core idea is a sound one.

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Cheers,

Dr. Austin Cory Bart

Assistant Professor

Computer Information Sciences

University of Delaware

https://acbart.com

[Thomas Price]

Hi all,

I'll add a follow-up to Cory's post here as well:

I haven't been involved in the curriculum packaging work, but I really appreciated the update and the tiered approach. I was immediately inspired to think about porting my courses.

However, one major adoption barrier I would face using the tools that were mentioned is that they seem to preference plain text formats. I get that there are many advantages to plain text, but even in CS, not everyone likes to write in markdown. I do like markdown for a lot of things, but I don't typically use it for course materials. I generally prefer Google Docs for my CS0 course. It's easier (for me) to add and format images, collaborate with colleagues, make updates. For my more advanced courses, I use latex with Overleaf for the macros and expressivity. 

I don't bring this up because I think you should switch to supporting X over Y, but I'm wondering if committing to any one format/representation is going to hinder wider adoption.

I agree that if you want versioning, separating content from presentation, and simplicity, plain text formats may be the only way to achieve that. I'm just wondering if you can also meet other user needs like:

• Easy collaboration and sharing like in GDocs/Overleaf (I'd like to minimize the number of pull requests and merges in my life :D)
• Easy (i.e. copy/paste) insertion and manipulation of images/tables/rich content

Best,

Thomas

[Igor dos Santos Montagner]

Dear all,

I also feel Thomas Price's pain regarding some types of content that are not really comfortable to write in Markdown. In my experience, tables are especially painful to write. Although I do like Pull Requests and Git, I know some people that would rather stay away from it and prefer other tools. So I agree that at least some responses to typical pain points should be addressed if a set of tools is recommended.

As I was reading the White Paper I noticed that, from the six concrete scenarios presented, only number 5 (parsing different course materials for research) would not be satisfied by a repository with editable .tex and .docx files produced by Overleaf and GDocs. It seemed to me that Packaging would be more about splitting content and student results and providing shareable material than actually enforcing a standard tool for course material. Of course that using the same format has the potential to make some tasks easier. Is this understanding reasonable?

If it is, this could work in the tiered approach: maybe a higher tier material would be produced with all recommended tools, but lower tier materials would still provide all that's needed to effectively use the material in different contexts. This last part might be difficult to define, though. 

I've just arrived here, so I hope I'm not repeating some old arguments and ideias.

Best regards,

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cssplice-curriculum-packaging-working-group/7fdd92ce-6b6e-4852-bd4e-feb9e4a62247n%40googlegroups.com.

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Igor Montagner
http://igormontagner.blogspot.com/

[Thomas Price]

Igor,

I agree - I don't think there's anything incompatible about the vision of the working group and non-markdown course materials. I think a lot of the tooling is first targeting plain text formats, since that's what the tool makers are using in their classes (dogfooding), but the organizing principles of materials packaging should work with other formats.

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Thomas Price

Assistant Professor

Department of Computer Science

North Carolina State University

[ Website | Email | Calendar ]

(he / him / his)

[Christopher Parnin]

Figured this would be a good time and the right people to share this.

Live command cells and live code editors, fully featured with syntax-highlighting and code completion...

Live terminals (with multi-target support)

Embedded google slides and embedded google videos.

And it's all based on simple markdown...

Let me know if you'd like to know more or see:
github.com/ottomatica/docable-notebooks

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cssplice-curriculum-packaging-working-group/CAOi9ad6YdYRo6EAfKNwq2%2B7hmLwRozbVfR%3DLCvYXQmyrEar7MA%40mail.gmail.com.

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Dr. Christopher Parnin

Assistant Professor

NC State University

EBII-3270

https://chrisparnin.me/

[Thomas Price]

Chris, this is really cool and seems like it would have a lot of applications. Have you used it in a classroom setting?

[Christopher Parnin]

Yes!

I've converted (been converting) all my DevOps course materials into notebooks for this semester.

So far, we're running the largest class yet (80+), asynchronous, yet with the least amount of technical issues ever. There is no way we'd be able to scale this up without the notebooks.

Before, I'd live code with a mix of slides, instructions on GitHub, terminal, and Visual Code... which was just a jumbled mess for me to navigate and explain to students and for them to follow along. Now it's easy for me to just record me going through things, embed that as a youtube video in the notebooks, students just run `docable-server import <giturl>` and they can watch video (picture n' picture) and follow along with me.

Right now, students run notebooks locally, but long-term, we're looking at being able to fully host everything on https://docable.cloud/