[Courses] What topics should the Local Data 101 course include?

[elipousson]

Back in the fall, we came up with the idea of building a course about making maps, visualizations, seeing trends and patterns in data about historic places and the past. I started to assemble materials for this class in the Local Data 101 repository.

• What topics should the Local Data course include?
• What existing resources are available that could be adapted or reused to create lessons around these topics?
• Who is the intended audience with the proposed Local Data 101 course?

[todrobbins]

@elipousson do we want to have the majority of this conversation over at the Local Data 101 repo?

[elipousson]

@todrobbins I've been trying to decide whether I should merge that repo back into this site for simplicity.

I had planned early on to create a series of course mini-sites using the P2PU course-in-a-box template. Projects like Software Carpentry take this approach of placing each workshop or course into a separate repo and encouraging instructors facilitating a course to fork the repo each time they teach it.

The alternate option is to merge everything back into this repo and turn the lessons into a collection (Minimal Mistakes looks like it handles collections well). I have a bunch of ideas for possible lessons but I haven't figured out the best way to divide them up into well-defined lessons. The idea of one big bucket as an interim step seems like it may be simpler but it likely has disadvantages too.

What do you think? Or are there other options I'm not considering?