Workshop Tips and Guidance

[Geoffrey Cox]

Hey all, 

I was invited to host a two-hour beginner-level workshop on "Authoring Accessible Course Materials in PreTeXt." I am reaching out to see if anyone has done this before and whether you would be willing to share any tips or resources.  
 
Here is the general framing of the Workshop:

Audience: Instructors curious about PreTeXt as an authoring tool for course materials. No prior PreTeXt, Git, or Codespaces experience assumed. LaTeX familiarity is a bonus but not required.

Objective: By the end of the workshop, you will have a small, working PreTeXt lesson that you authored, built, previewed, and published to a public web link you can share.

I have been comfortably using PreTeXt for a while, but I am sure there are easier workflows than the local Linux one I am using. So, I had a few questions: 

• I just noticed the PreTeXt.Plus beta. Has anyone used this in a workshop-like setting? Can it be used as a full-fledged editor, like Overleaf for LaTeX? 
• If not, is GitHub Codespace still the recommended starting point for new and non-technical adopters?

If I go the GitHub Codespaces route, has anyone experienced any firewall issues from certain networks?

Any tips or other resources would be most welcome. 

Thanks,

Geoff

[Chrissy Safranski]

We at mathtech.org have run similar (virtual) workshops multiple times this semester, with 1 more coming up in a couple of weeks.  I would say that we've learned that for that audience even Codespaces is pretty rough.  Some participants will follow along and get stuff out of it, and those people will know more about what PreTeXt really is and its capabilities, but many participants will be overwhelmed and convinced that PreTeXt is for programmers, and if they get distracted even for a few minutes, it's hard for them to get caught back up. 

We have moved toward using PreTeXt.plus for the Getting Started workshops, and it has been more successful.  The questions we get are more about the capabilities and philosophy and less about the technology.  It gets people working and sharing quickly and gives them confidence that they can learn and do more.  

PreTeXt.plus is a different kind of editor.  Right now, it's injecting all of the content into an article, I believe.  So you can't (yet) do anything multi-file.  You can do PreFigure, but you can't upload images.  You can edit content right there, save, and get a public share link.  

Here is a link to the youtube channel containing recordings.  https://www.youtube.com/@MathTechOrg 

In January we made it 2 hours and used codespaces exclusively; in February, we still did 2 hours, but we used both PreTeXt.plus and codespaces.  And in March, we just did PreTeXt.plus with a focus on worksheets for 1 hour.  Each of the videos has a list of useful links that we put into the chat at various times.  

I would suggest you recruit an accomplice if you can.  It's super helpful to have 1 person handling the chat while the other is presenting/demonstrating.  

PreTeXt.plus is just rolling out a new way of writing PreTeXt that looks like LaTeX but is converted to PreTeXt behind the scenes, so for folks comfortable with LaTeX, that could be a good feature to demo, but it sounds like not all your audience will know LaTeX, so that might only muddy the waters.    

Maybe Tien, Oscar, or Steven would say something more or different?

Chrissy

[Geoffrey Cox]

Thanks, Chrissy.

This is exactly the kind of feedback I was hoping for, and the "PreTeXt is for programmers" perception was one of my concerns. It will be in-person, and I don't think there will be any potential accomplices around to help.

Based on your experience, I'm thinking it may be best to pivot the workshop to use PreTeXtPlus as the primary authoring environment and dedicate the final 30 minutes as an optional codespace tutorial for anyone still interested.

A few quick follow-ups if you don't mind:

1. Are the free-tier PreTeXtPlus accounts reliable at workshop scale, or have you run into quota, rate limits, or signup-email issues when 20–30 people create accounts in the same 10 minutes?
2. For the Share-link step specifically, is there any delay between clicking Share and the link being live? I want to know whether to build a buffer into the pacing.
3. Have any activity prompts landed especially well with your audiences (a topic, a worksheet template, a conversion example) that you'd be willing to share or comment on?

I'll dig into the MathTech YouTube recordings before my session. Really appreciate the pointers, and I'll happily share my experiences and what I put together back with the group once it's done.

[Chrissy Safranski]

I think that sounds like a good plan!  Those last 30 minutes could even be worktime for people who don't want to learn about codespaces. 

PreTeXt.plus really is awesome for getting started quickly, or for writing and sharing small things.   One thing I plan to say more strongly in future workshops is that similarly to how WeBWorK is free if you host your own server, but you can also pay for someone else to handle that part for you, PreTeXt is open source and can be done locally or in a codespace (and we always give a link to pfi.mathtech.org for startup instructions for people who want to do that), but that we're using PreTeXt.plus in Getting Started workshops because it's a friendlier-to-newcomers way of using PreTeXt.

1. We haven't seen any trouble with accounts, but we did always send out the link ahead of time and ask people to create an account before arriving.  Most people (but not all) did.  

2. No delay between getting the share link and it being live. 

3. This is a slightly modified version of a worksheet I used with my classes last fall, and it has gone over well in a few different talks/workshops now.  Feel free to borrow and/or adapt it!  It has objectives, workspace, sidebyside, md both with and without mrow, lists with multiple columns, answers, and a couple different cross-reference formats. We have often paired it with a separate demo of a structured exercise with introduction and tasks with their own answers, which is better in most settings but can't be arranged in multiple columns.  https://pretext.plus/projects/dadc1bf3-11f5-44a0-8d6d-6d310c3bfa44/share/source

I look forward to hearing your experience and what your thoughts are!

Chrissy