Briefly about the situation in universities (personal experience)
To begin with, it is worth mentioning that the material presented is subjective, so to speak, “a look from the inside”, but it feels like the information is relevant for many state universities in the post-Soviet space.
Due to the demand for IT specialists, many educational institutions have opened relevant training areas. Moreover, even students of non-IT specialties have reached a lot of IT subjects, often it is Python, R, less fortunate many have to master “dusty” learning languages, like Pascal.
If you look deeper, everything is not so simple. Not all teachers keep up with the "trends". Personally, while studying in the “programming” specialty, I was faced with the fact that some teachers do not have up-to-date lecture notes. To be more precise, the teacher threw off a photo of notes written by hand by some student on a flash drive to the headman. I am completely silent about the relevance of such materials as manuals on WEB programming (2010). It also remains to be guessed about what is happening in technical schools and the worst of the worst educational institutions.
In summary:
- They print a lot of irrelevant information in pursuit of quantitative academic indicators;
- The release of new materials is unorganized;
- “Trend” and relevant details are often missed due to simple ignorance;
- It is difficult to get feedback from the author;
- Updated editions are rare and irregular.
"I do not agree - criticize, criticize - offer ..."
The first thing that comes to mind is the introduction of systems based on the engine . Yes, yes, everyone has heard about Wikipedia, but it has a reference encyclopedic character. We are more interested in educational materials. suits us better. Among the shortcomings can be identified:
- mandatory openness of all materials (quote: "Here in the wiki environment, educational literature is collaboratively written, distributed freely and available to everyone.")
- the presence of some dependence on the rules of the site, the internal hierarchy of users
Many wiki engines are floating around in the public domain, but I don't think it's even necessary to start talking about the possibility of deploying a wiki system on a university scale. From experience I will say that: a) fault tolerance suffers for such self-hosted solutions; b) you can forget about system updates (with very rare exceptions).
For a long time, I pondered to no avail how to improve the situation. And then one day a friend said that a long time ago he printed a draft book on A4, but lost the electronic version. I was interested in how to turn it all into an electronic form.
This was a textbook with a significant amount of formulas and graphs, so popular OCR tools like helped half way. Finereader gave out pieces of plain text, which we began to enter into ordinary text files, breaking into chapters, marking everything up in MarkDown. Obviously used for the convenience of cooperation. As a remote repository we used , the reason was the possibility of creating private repositories with a free plan (this is also true for ). For formulaic insertions, I found . At this stage, they finally turned towards "MarkDown + LaTeX", since the formulas were converted to . Used to convert to pdf .
Over time, a simple text editor was not enough, I began to look for a replacement. Tried and several other similar programs. As a result, we came to a web solution and started using , there was everything you need, from syncing with github to support for LaTeX and comments.
Speaking specifically, as a result, a simple script was written for which I am ashamed, which performed the task of assembling and converting the typed text to WEB. A simple HTML template was sufficient for this.
Here are the commands for converting to WEB:
find ./src -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -exec cp -r -t ./dist {} +
find ./dist -iname "*.md" -type f -exec sh -c 'pandoc "find ./src -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -exec cp -r -t ./dist {} +
find ./dist -iname "*.md" -type f -exec sh -c 'pandoc "${0}" -s --katex -o "${0::-3}.html" --template ./temp/template.html --toc --toc-depth 2 --highlight-style=kate --mathjax=https://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML' {} ;
find ./dist -name "*.md" -type f -exec rm -f {} ;
" -s --katex -o "${0::-3}.html" --template ./temp/template.html --toc --toc-depth 2 --highlight-style=kate --mathjax=https://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML' {} ;
find ./dist -name "*.md" -type f -exec rm -f {} ;It does nothing smart, from what can be noted: it collects content titles for easy navigation and converts LaTeX.
At the moment, there is an idea to automate the assembly when making pushes to rap on github, using Continuous Integration services (Circle CI, Travis CI ..)
Nothing is new...
Having become interested in this idea, I began to look for how popular it is now.
It was obvious that this idea is not new for software documentation. I saw quite a few examples of training materials for programmers, for example: JS courses . Also interested in the idea of a git-based wiki engine called
I have seen quite a few repositories with books written entirely in LaTeX.
Hack and predictor Aviator
Many students rewrite several times the notes that I wrote many, many times before them (I do not question the usefulness of writing by hand), each time the information is lost and updated very slowly, not all notes, as we understand, are in electronic form. As a result, it would be great to upload the notes to github (convert to pdf, web-view), and offer teachers to do the same. To a certain extent, this would attract students and teachers to the “live” competitive github community, not to mention the increase in the amount of information to be digested.
For example I leave a link to the first chapter of the book I spoke about, and here is a link to .
Source: habr.com