Prevent obsolescence of educational materials

Briefly about the situation in the universities (personal experience)

To begin with, it is worthwhile to stipulate that the material presented is subjective, so to speak, “a look from the inside,” but the information seems to be relevant for many state-run universities in the post-Soviet space.

Due to the demand for IT specialists, many educational institutions have opened up relevant training areas. Moreover, even to students not at all of the “IT” specialties, a lot of IT profile subjects have reached, often it is Python, R, less lucky many have to learn "dusty" training languages, like Pascal.

If you look deeper, then everything is not so simple. Not all teachers keep up with the "trends". Personally, when I studied in the “programmer” specialty, I was confronted with the fact that some teachers do not have actual lecture notes. To be more precise, the teacher took off the head of the photo of the notes written by some student on a flash drive. I am completely silent about the relevance of such materials as training manuals on WEB-programming (2010). It also remains to guess about what is happening in technical schools and the worst of the worst educational institutions.

Eventually:

• They print a lot of irrelevant information in pursuit of quantitative academic indicators;
• The release of new materials occurs unorganized;
• Often, “trend” and actual details are missed due to ordinary ignorance;
• Difficult 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 Media Wiki engine. Yes, yes, everyone has heard about Wikipedia, but it has an encelopedic reference character. We are also more interested in learning materials. Wikibooks us better. Among the shortcomings can be identified:

• the compulsory openness of all materials (quote: "Here, in a wiki environment, educational literature is written jointly, distributed freely and accessible to all.")
• the presence of some dependence on the rules of the site, the internal hierarchy of users
  Many wiki engines float in open access, but I think that we should not even begin to talk about the possibility of deploying a wiki system across the university. From experience, I would say that: a) fault tolerance suffers in such self-host solutions; b) you can forget about system updates (with very few exceptions).

For a long time, I have been thinking in vain about how to improve the situation. Then one day an acquaintance said that he had long ago printed a draft of a book on A4, and lost the electronic version. I was interested in how to turn it all into an electronic form.

It was a textbook with a significant number of formulas and graphs, so the popular OCR tools, such as abbyy finereader , helped in half. Finereader produced pieces of plain text, which we began to put into ordinary text files, splitting into chapters, marked everything in MarkDown. Obviously, used git for the convenience of cooperation. We used BitBucket as a remote repository, the reason was the possibility of creating private repositories with a free data plan (this is also true for GitLab ). For formula inserts found Mathpix . At this stage, finally turned in the direction of "MarkDown + LaTeX", since the formulas were converted to LaTeX . Pandoc was used to convert to pdf.

Over time, a simple text editor was not enough, I began to look for a replacement. I tried Typora and several other similar programs. As a result, we came to a web solution and started using stackedit , everything was there, from syncing with github to supporting LaTeX and comments.

More specifically, a simple script was written based on the result. for which I am ashamed who performed the task of assembling and converting the typed text in the WEB. For this was enough simple HTML template.
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 "${0}" -s --katex -o "${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 {} \; 

He does not do anything clever, from what can be noted: he collects content headers for easy navigation and converts LaTeX.

At the moment, there is a thought to automate the assembly when doing pushing to a rep on github, using Continuous Integration services (Circle CI, Travis CI ..)

Nothing new ...

Interested in this thought, I began to look for how popular it is now.
It was obvious that this idea was not new for software documentation. Not a few saw examples of educational materials for programmers, for example: courses JS learn.javascript.ru . Also interested in the idea of ​​a git-based wiki engine called Gollum

Many have seen repositories with books, completely written in LaTeX.

Conclusion

Many students rewrite notes several times, which they wrote many times before (I don’t question the use of handwritten letters), each time information is lost and updated very slowly, not all notes, as we understand, are in electronic form. As a result, it would be cool to upload notes on github (reconfigure into pdf, web-view), it’s the same to offer to the teachers. To a certain extent, this would attract students and teachers to a “live” competitive github community, not to mention an increase in the amount of digestible information.

For example, leave a link to the first chapter of the book about which he spoke, so she and here is the link to the rap itself.