Introducing the Morea Framework

[philipmjohnson]

Greetings, all,

I would like to let you know about a mashup of GitHub, Jekyll, Bootstrap, and a tiny Ruby plugin that I've created to facilitate the design and construction of courses. It's called the Morea Framework:

http://morea-framework.github.io/

It implements a "pedagogical pattern" involving Modules, Learning Outcomes, Readings, Experiences, and Assessments that (at least for me) makes it easier to express the intent of my courses: when, where, why, and how to learn. (It also makes it easier to know when I've failed to express this intent.)

Morea is in early days; there are currently about a half dozen classes at the University of Hawaii using it, and I will be using it exclusively for the foreseeable future. :)

The home page has a six minute video that provides some details on why I created the framework, and why (or why not) you might be interested in trying it out.

Please check it out if you like, and feel free to email me or reply to this thread if you have questions or comments.

Philip

[eduOS]

Fantastic! I am trying to facilitate collaborative learning using Git/GitHub and the tools around it. I want to know more about your mashup, and I think that it inspires me to create one for our own use.

[philipmjohnson]

Sounds good, as you have specific questions, I'd be happy to answer them. To start, take a look through the Quick Start, User Guide, and Developer Guide pages.

[eduOS]

I followed your tutorial, only to encounter this error when I tried to display the site locally:

I could not both display it locally and publish the website. Could you please tell me why and how to conquer it? Thanks very much. @philipmjohnson

[plusjade]

Based on the stack trace you can try installing a javascript runtime listed in the mentioned documentation. I use 'therubyracer'. To install just run this in your terminal:

gem install therubyracer

After it's installed, try running the jekyll command again.

[eduOS]

Thanks very much for taking the time, plusjade. I followed your advice but met another error:

  Processing file:  /bar/assessment.md
Error reading file /home/leo2/Documents/nonCS001-Fall2014/master/src/morea/bar/assessment.md: undefined method `in_source_dir' for nil:NilClass 

How could I do now? Thanks. P.S. I thought that it is the installation of Ruby 2.1 from source that caused all these errors.

[philipmjohnson]

Might be related to this?

https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/issues/2678

[eduOS]

Thanks @philipmjohnson Maybe not. I installed rouge and set it, but it didn't work. The error is the same.

I checked one of the files that smells but found no that method named in_source_dir in it:

[philipmjohnson]

OK, I just took a deeper look at this, and it turns out to be a problem with the Jekyll version. For some reason (and I blame Jekyll :), Morea works fine with Jekyll 2.1.0 but generates the "undefined method `in_source_dir'' error with the latest version of Jekyll.

I was able to reproduce this locally and fix it by downgrading Jekyll to version 2.1.0:

sudo gem uninstall jekyll
sudo gem install jekyll -v 2.1.0

I will file an issue with the Jekyll development team to see how to fix this. Some googling indicated that using Bundler would fix it, but I tried that and it didn't work for me. In the interim, Jekyll 2.1.0 should fix your problem.

Sorry for the confusion!

[philipmjohnson]

OK, after some back and forth with the Jekyll developers, we figured out that there was a very simple update needed to the Morea plugin to make it compatible with the latest release of Jekyll (https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/issues/3214).

I've now updated the basic-template repository with the fix. The best way to get it into your Morea site is via the morea-merge-upstream script, documented here.

Kudos to the Jekyll developer team for providing such efficient and effective support!

Philip

[Badlapje]

This looks like a nice framework, nice job @philipmjohnson . Given it's been a couple years since this was posted i've a couple questions:

• are you still using this and what's the experience been so far?
• what's the technical barrier like for students when they use this?
• Is this usable for non CS students (eg. could this be used by eg. Psychology teachers and their students)?
• I haven't gotten round to testing this yet, as i just stumbled over it while checking out github education resources. But is this open source? I ask because we're looking to develop our own learning tools and being able to amend morea would be very interesting.

[philipmjohnson]

Yes, @Badlapje, the Morea Framework is still in active use every semester. We haven't released any new updates to the framework recently because, well, there hasn't been any pressing need. Here's my software engineering course site for this semester, for example.

The technical barrier is low/non-existent for students. I did surveys for a few semesters and the majority of students felt it was easier to use than the alternative learning management system at UH (Sekai). I don't think the degree program of the students matters at all.

The technical barrier is significantly higher for teachers; you need to know a little bit about Jekyll, a little bit about GitHub, a little bit about Markdown, and a little bit about Bootstrap. And, you need to buy in at least a little bit to the idea that organizing your course into modules, outcomes, readings, experiences, and assessments.

Yes, it's open source, and I am happy to be a resource person if you want to use it as a basis for your own efforts.