Teaching content

Overview

  • Why? Motivation
  • What? Define requirements/guidelines for teaching content
  • How? Define methods to create teaching content

Motivation

Target state

  • Access to course material needed to learn should be
    • Standardized: at institute, national or international level
    • Free: in context of price and usage (without limitations of licensing)
    • Accessible: digital version available on web which can be modified as needed

Benefit

  • Ensures minimum quality
    • Not all teachers across every institute are at the same competency level
    • Students get access to the best possible content irrespective of institute
  • Reduce load from faculty
    • Faculty can focus on other aspects like lecture demos, labs, experiments, exams etc.
  • Evolve over time with little incremental effort
    • For most subjects, even in higher studies, core fundamentals change very slowly

Requirements

Content

  • Book for each subject which also acts like reference notes
  • Slides to deliver lectures
  • Tools to aid teaching

Features

  • Simple to produce but effective
  • Structuring the knowledge
    • Content should reflect the structure through parts and chapters
  • Visualization
    • Tables, figures, diagrams, plots (interactive)
  • Well designed toc
  • Download available for offline use

Methods

Administration

  • This can be organized at institute, national or international level
  • E.g. Organizations like IEEE engage the best of academia to collaborate through committees
    • Provide the content itself rather than guidelines
  • The content produced is available to use for free by any institute around the globe
  • The academia use the same tool to edit and collaborate effectively as per use case

Requirements

  • Faculty development programs
    • Content
      • Quarto
      • Basic programming
      • Basic version control
    • Advantages
      • Faculty becomes aware what can be done
      • Faculty can use the knowledge for other publishing tasks
        • Reproducible research
      • Faculty at all levels can edit the content as required

Tool: Quarto

  • Easy to author: as easy as writing a word document, once configured
  • Portable: content is portable across different formats
  • Aesthetics: isolation of aesthetics, good aesthetics by default
  • Tractable: content is in text format therefore can be version controled effectively
  • Templates: available for academic publications
  • Integration: output can be easily configured to integrate into websites