sayamindu / course-starter

Starter pack for my course material

Course material starter pack

This is the "starter pack" that I use for my course material. The slides directory contains a template for slides, and the syllabus directory contains a template for a syllabus.

The templates are written in Markdown and are processed with Pandoc to generate PDF and self-contained HTML files that you can put in your course website and/or share with students.

In order to use the templates, you will need

• Pandoc
• Python 3 (with pip and virtualenv)
• GNU Make

I have only used this in GNU/Linux systems, if you are using this on any other operating system, this may not work out of the box.

Slides

A sample set of slides is provided in the sampleslide directory. Copy that directory, edit the slides.md file, and type make in the directory to generate your slides. The name of the copied directory should start with day (e.g., day-01-introductions).

The file slides/common.mk has a few variables at the top which you may want to tweak.

Syllabus

The syllabus directory contains a template syllabus in the file index.md.

The Makefile in the syllabus directory contains some variables such as course number that you may want to change.

Typing make in the syllabus directory will generate a PDF version of the syllabus along with a self-contained HTML version. The PDF generation process requires LaTeX. More information on installing LaTeX for use with Pandoc can be found in Pandoc's installation documentation.

Generating course schedules

Among other things, the template uses Pantable to include a course schedule from the CSV file in the generated syllabus. In order to generate the CSV file (you can see a sample in schedule.csv), you can use the utilities/schedulestarter.py to generate a "starter" schedule CSV file. You can use the -h argument to understand how to use the tool.

$ python utils/schedulestarter.py -h
usage: schedulestarter.py [-h] -s STARTDATE -e ENDDATE -d DAYS -c COLS -o OUTPUT

Generates an empty class schedule CSV file

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -s STARTDATE, --startdate STARTDATE
                        First day of classes (YYYY-MM-DD)
  -e ENDDATE, --enddate ENDDATE
                        Last day of classes (YYYY-MM-DD)
  -d DAYS, --days DAYS  Comma-separated days of the week in numbers (e.g., 0,2 is Monday, Wednesday)
  -c COLS, --cols COLS  Comma-separated names of additional columns for the CSV file (e.g., Topic,"Read before class",Exercise)
  -o OUTPUT, --output OUTPUT
                        Output CSV file name (will be overwritten)
$ 

So, if I were to generate a schedule called schedule.csv for a course between 10th January 2021 (first day of classes) and 2nd May 2021 (last day of classes), meeting on Monday and Wednesday, with a column for the day's topic, I would use the following command:

$ python utils/schedulestarter.py -s 2021-01-10 -e 2021-05-02 -d 0,2 -c Topic -o schedule.csv 

This generates a CSV file of the form:

Date,Topic
"Monday, January 11",
"Wednesday, January 13",
"Monday, January 18",
"Wednesday, January 20",
"Monday, January 25",
[...]
"Monday, April 26",
"Wednesday, April 28",

A spreadsheet software can then be used to edit the CSV file (make sure that you save it as a CSV file). The file can then be included in the syllabus.md as per the Pantable instructions.

Sub-pages

I usually generate my syllabus as one single HTML page. However, in some courses, more pages may be needed (e.g., for assignment submission instructions). The file page1.md is an example of such a page, with the sample index.md including a link to it.