[School-of-data] Course editing on the new School of Data platform

Mon May 5 07:44:46 UTC 2014

Dirk,

First of all: Thanks for the awesome detailed response. We do have to chat
some time so I can suck your brain dry ;)

On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 12:10:43PM -0300, Dirk Uys wrote:
> > Creation
> 
> Are you planning to allow anyone to create a course or would it only
> be someone you already have some interaction with that will create
> courses? We aim at allowing anyone to create a course on P2PU, but
> that complicates things - spam, stripping content of harmful scripts,
> HTML, lots of empty courses that were simply tests, etc.

Currently I'm thinking about having at least a step of editing between
creation and being published - but this is something we have to discuss as
a group.

> > translation
> 
> You probably want to translate two different parts - UI and the course
> content itself. Do you view translations as different versions of the
> same course or do they become different courses? A course is more that
> the content, there's a community that surrounds it. So, do you have
> separate sub-communities for the different languages or just one big
> community? Will different language communities have the same
> curriculum?

Right now we do have different language community with completely split
platforms. We'd like to unify this more. 

I do agree that there are two different aspects: the platform and the
content. I'd love to have both translated but the content also can live
independently.

> With regards of tools for translation, have a look at Transifex
> (https://www.transifex.com/), they support the common formats and have
> a good interface for managing translations.

Started to use it before (both as project manager and translator) and love
it.

> > curation
> 
> I recommend keeping the solution low tech but specifying good
> guidelines like the School of Open does:
> https://p2pu.hackpad.com/School-of-Open-Course-Review#School-of-Open-Course-Review.
> School of Open also distinguishes between courses they 'endorse' and
> courses run by the community.

I'd like to have at least some level of support for curation by the
platform but the basic processes do have to be simple and low-tech.

> > Would markdown work? Or would you prefer a fully fledged WYSIWYG editor?
> 
> We started quite a while back with a WYSIWYG editor - you never really
> get what you see :) but you get close. ckeditor.com and
> www.tinymce.com is pretty good, but the HTML that you get out of it
> drives me mad sometimes!
> 
> We moved to markdown and it seems to be working well. You have more
> control over keeping things consistent and with a little bit of
> adjustment people get used to it. Like other people pointed out, there
> are pretty good editors for Markdown. I think an inline preview and a
> quick cheatsheet is a must if you go with Markdown.

Thanks, was thinking about using pagedown for both preview and editing.

> > How much freedom is needed - how much structure does there need to be?
> 
> Having some structure and consistency is good, but when people feel
> restricted and don't benefit from expertise they have (like HTML, CSS,
> JavaScript), that's bad.

That's how I felt when first working with the (old) p2pu platform. This was
one of the reasons we decided to build some of the stuff seperately.

> > Other questions
> 
> What are your current thoughts on comments and discussion?

We do have a Q&A platform right now (ask.schoolofdata.org) I'd like to
tightly integrate something like this into courses and the platform. 

> To what level do you want to integrate badges in courses? (I think you
> are using badgekit if I remember correctly?)

Badges all the way down! I wrote my own badge issuing service (couldn't
figure out badgekit...)

Michael

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