Open mbjones opened 11 months ago
Some pros and cons of using Quarto or Jupyter Books:
Pros
Cons
Version control: solutions to not sync the output to GitHub were not straightforward. In particular, from this discussion in Pangeo forum:
“In this situation, members would look at a notebook wo changing it, but Git would say it was changed and there was a merge conflict due to the XML associated with code output (say plots). These type of merge conflicts don’t arise with qmd files since they are flat ascii.”
(minor) Markdown rendering appearance discrepancy between executing notebooks on a website versus executing same notebook in the JupyterLab UI.
I haven' tried this, but it seems that skipping execution of certain cells in Notebooks is harder than doing that in qmd. See: https://jupyterbook.org/en/stable/reference/cheatsheet.html -> #tags , and https://discourse.jupyter.org/t/is-there-a-cell-tag-convention-to-skip-execution/5445/9.
Cool examples Environmental Data Science Book Website Repository
Earth and Environmental Data Science Book Website Repository
Pros
Cons
Cool examples Python for Data Analysis Website Repository
Arctic Data Center Scalable Computing Course Website Repository
I also checked out Notion, the LMS Kate suggested. Seems like a great tool for organizing teams and sharing documentation. However, this doesn't seem like the best platform for sharing course content because there is no support for executable code. You can add code in-line and code-style cells using markdown, but there isn't a way to execute cells and render outputs.
Also checked Discourse. This is a platform to create community forums. This seems like a great complement to an online book and, in general, to build the Cyber2A community. An example of how this could look like is the Discourse for the Pangeo community.
I looked through the plugins and this Calendar plugin seems like something we'd want so we can display the dates for the seminar and trainings, but only found this one. But at a closer look it does not seem quite like what we need (since every user can add to it) and it’s only available on the Business plan ($300/month).
@carmengg I added a github action to build the example quarto book that you made and publish it to Github pages anytime someone pushes to the main
branch. You can see:
We can link the book into the main Cyber2A web page later when it is more mature. Maybe it would be good to add a "DRAFT" indicator to the title and first page of the book?
@mbjones Thanks for setting up the GitHub action and deploying it on GitHub pages. I added the Draft mention in the book and the README for this repo.
@carmengg, thanks for the detailed evaluation.
I think it might be worth considering a Learning Management System (LMS) or MOOC platforms for our Cyber2A course. While Quarto Books excel at interactive lectures, an LMS or MOOC could offer additional teaching and learning tools, such as grading and analytics.
Pros:
Cons:
Here's a preliminary comparison between MOOC platforms like Coursera, Udemy or Udacity and traditional LMSs like Moodle, Canvas, or Blackboard.
MOOC Pros:
MOOC Cons:
LMS Pros:
This list isn't exhaustive, but it should give us a good starting point for discussion.
Previous courses we've taught have used various open formats for learning materials, including Quarto notebooks, Jupyter Notebooks, and RMarkdown notebooks. Other Learning Management Systems might also be of interest. Evaluate and decide on the format for course materials. Candidates:
The repository for the materials to be built is in https://github.com/cyber2a/cyber2a-course