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programminghistorian / jekyll

Jekyll-based static site for The Programming Historian
http://programminghistorian.org
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add lesson difficulty indicators to lessons page #91

Closed fredgibbs closed 8 years ago

fredgibbs commented 9 years ago

this is relatively easy to do (if a bit time consuming; but could be divided up among many people), and could be a big help in helping new visitors understand the variety of lessons we have. if such a visitor just happened to skim an advanced lesson but thought it was for beginners, that may be the last thing they view on the site. we'd have to decide on a scale; i'd suggest something like 1-5 to start with.

acrymble commented 9 years ago

I do support this idea. Is 5 too many gradients? What's the difference between a 3 and a 4? I do think there are lessons a new person can jump right into and achieve with no other background, and others that require some pre-work or pre-skills. What does everyone think of just beginner and intermediate as a starting point?

fredgibbs commented 9 years ago

we definitely have a few advanced lessons (i'd say), so i'd say we need at least 3 levels--but i still think that's too few. i would say the difference b/w a 3 and 4 is that a 3 is a thoroughly intermediate lesson (compared to other lessons) with one or two advanced concepts integral to the lesson (that other "3" lessons don't have). perhaps we could try to rank the lessons 1-5 and if we have virtually no 2s or 4s then we could get rid of them for simplicity. i'd be surprised if that were the case, but then again i haven't systematically thought through all the lessons. overall, i hope we end up with something like a bell curve across all lessons, which is why i think 5 categories would be helpful for us to use when helping authors conceive of or write lessons.

On Sun, May 10, 2015 at 8:32 AM, Adam Crymble notifications@github.com wrote:

I do support this idea. Is 5 too many gradients? What's the difference between a 3 and a 4? I do think there are lessons a new person can jump right into and achieve with no other background, and others that require some pre-work or pre-skills. What does everyone think of just beginner and intermediate as a starting point?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/programminghistorian/jekyll/issues/91#issuecomment-100647310 .

frederick w gibbs | assistant professor of history | univ. of new mexico fredgibbs.net | @fredgibbs http://www.twitter.com/fredgibbs

acrymble commented 9 years ago

What if we let readers decide? By that I mean, let them rank a lesson's difficulty once they've finished it

ianmilligan1 commented 9 years ago

I think this is a great idea, too!

FWIW, I worry that five gradients might be a bit too much, whereas three is perhaps a sweet spot (Fred's idea of going through and seeing might make this more informed - perhaps there is too much complexity for three categories to adequately capture..).

Something like:

I think this works well. DHSI has three gradients which I think works well, in concept at least.

ahegel commented 9 years ago

In our Skype call today, we agreed to go through our previously published lessons and mark their difficulty (enter it at the end of each line after the colon). We're starting with "Beginner," "Intermediate," and "Advanced," but if, as you're going through the lessons, you feel that we need more categories, leave a comment!

FG: i've used 1=beginner; 2=intermediate; 3=advanced. i'm thinking we could have 1-3 little computer icons to indicate difficulty (i'm sure i'm unconsciously thinking of menus with little chili peppers to indicate spiciness).

ianmilligan1 commented 9 years ago

Just went through and I think this looks good - in my mind a Difficulty One is something that can be done as a completely self-contained lesson, whereas the others are more advanced or have dependencies (i.e. "Applied Archival Downloading with Wget" really requires the introductory lesson).

The only one I might change would be "Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown" - it predates our CLI lessons, and I think it does a really good job of laying things out clearly (down to reminding us where to find the terminal applications on multiple platforms).

acrymble commented 9 years ago

I like the idea of defined criteria, Ian. Can we go down that road and see if we need to re-think?

acrymble commented 8 years ago

It looks like this got lost, but we've done all of the work. Just need to add to YAML I presume?

wcaleb commented 8 years ago

I've added the difficulty indicators to the lessons in the checklist above. From now on, when adding a new lesson, we need to add a difficulty: 1 (or 2 or 3) line to the YAML metadata for the lesson. There are some lessons currently that still need that added---I only did the ones listed in the checklist.

Two other things still need to be done before the issue is closed:

  1. Somewhere on the site we should describe for readers what the levels mean, and perhaps write a Javascript so that hovering over the difficulty level on a given lesson shows a pop-up definition.
  2. Update either our editorial instructions or guidelines for reviewers to include a section about deciding what difficulty level to give to a lesson.
wcaleb commented 8 years ago

Closing this because I think it's more or less done---if we spot lessons that still need the difficulty indicators, we can add them as we find them.