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IlIllII / collecobrary

Making online learning fun and easy.
https://shapesofknowledge.io
MIT License
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Update course descriptions #10

Open IlIllII opened 3 years ago

IlIllII commented 3 years ago

I added a number of courses to the website and created excellent descriptions for some of them. However, as I continued to add more courses I started to get lazy with the descriptions and just put one-liner placeholders. These could be updated.

If you choose to update any of them, here is some guidance:

First, course descriptions are located in assets/descriptions.json and are structured as follows:

  1. The top part of a description is a generic description that describes the course content. What does the course cover, who should take it, what do you learn, where do you go next, etc.
  2. The bottom part of a description is a source specific description that describes details specific to the individual course. Where can you find materials, are there lecture videos, when is the course from, do they update the course website annually, etc.

Now, to update a description, here are some tips:

  1. Read the syllabus to see what the course covers. Put this in the generic description, but don't just copy and paste because syllabi aren't always written well. It may take some synthesis if the generic course has multiple specific courses under it, because it is unlikely that the courses all teach identical subject matter. You may find that these are not actually equivalent and then we can restructure the curricula, but if they are sufficiently similar we just want to describe the archetypal course. The goal is for learners to quickly and easily understand how the course fits in the curriculum so they can decide if they want to take it.
  2. The course-specific description is where you can detail what makes this course different from the generic descriptions and also include what kind of materials are available and where to find them. Additionally, you can pass a subjective judgement and mention the quality of the course, but you should only do this if you have spent a decent amount of time looking at it, such as actually taking the course.