Course Overview & Procedure#
Now that you’ve got an idea of what this website is about let’s discuss how we’ll hopefully get your course up and running. This section will clarify this course’s structure and general setup.
The course is divided into several modules, each covering a step in creating your course. The modules include an introduction in GitHub, how you host your course website and how you create and structure your content. You can simply start from the beginning and work your way down through all respective sections. If you’re already familiar with the concepts of GitHub and the Jupyter Framework, you can also go to the Quick Setup Guide for a very quick tutorial to creating and hosting your own course.
This tutorial is further paired with a template course that you can find here. We’ll, in essence, teach you how to adapt this template to host your own online courses. An explanation of the template can be found in the chapter on Hosting Your Course Website.
Objectives đź“Ť#
At the end of the course, you will be able to:
Get to know how Jupyter Books work.
See the benefits for teaching and research.
Build your own online course or website with Jupyter Book.
Create and format content using Markdown.
Use GitHub Pages to host and share your materials.
Structure of the Course#
The course is structured as follows:
Why Jupyter Books? An Introduction Explore the advantages of free and accessible online courses and how Jupyter Books can enhance digital teaching.
Getting Started with GitHub Learn what GitHub is, how to create an account, and how to start a new project.
Hosting Your Course Website Discover how to publish and maintain your own course website using our course template.
Creating Engaging Content Master the basics of creating and editing files, formatting with Markdown, and embedding media.
Additional Chapters: (in development – stay tuned!)
Quick Setup Guide Follow a step-by-step guide to quickly set up and deploy your course using Jupyter Book on GitHub.
Introduction to Git Learn what Git is and how to use it for local editing and version control.
Introduction to Jupyter Notebooks Learn the fundamentals of Jupyter Notebooks and how to use them for interactive content.
Introduction to Google Colab Discover how to integrate automatically gradable coding assignments into your course.
Resources for Your Course Explore resources to help create a safe, inclusive, and productive course environment.
Course Examples Check out courses already created and maintained by the DiLER project.
You can also find the sections in the Table of Content on the left side.
How do I get all the software needed?
Everything we’ll use is open-source software or, at minimum, free of charge and publicly available. Why? Because teaching via proprietary software is just not fair and doesn’t align with our values (see our open science statement). We don’t want people to have to obtain licenses or be dependent on university resources or pay for software/hosting, etc., out of their own pocket. Additionally, open-source software can do everything, if not more than proprietary software and is furthermore usually better supported, tested, and documented, creating a fantastic sense of community.
To complete this course and host your own course website, all you need is a GitHub account. How to set it up is explained in the respective section. If you want to edit your course content locally, you will also need to install Git and a text editor that supports Markdown and Jupyter Notebook files. More information on this can be found in the additional section on Git.
Where do I find everything?
All course materials will be available on this very course website. Everything will be completely open and free to use, thus constituting an open educational resource. You are free to explore, enhance, and share. Thus, this website and all materials will also remain up ideally to the end of the internet but will possibly be subject to changes and updates. If you feel the need to save this resource as it is at the moment you’re reading this, you can download the complete course from our GitHub repository here. The usage of this resource and the materials therein will be explained at the beginning and throughout the course.
We will also be providing a course template that will serve as a tool for our practical examples. The template contains a folder structure, some example content files, a license, an open science statement, an equity, diversity, and inclusion statement, as well as a code of conduct for your course. This template is supposed to be used as a starting point to generate your own course. Simply add your content or adapt the preexisting resources, adapt the structure to your liking, and upload the whole thing into an online GitHub repository, and your course website will be created automatically.
How to Reach the Content Creators#
If you have questions about course content - these are awesome! We want everyone to see them and have their questions answered, too, so you could use the hypothes.is plugin, on the right-hand side of this website. Overlayed over the scroll bar, you’ll find buttons/functionality to annotate and highlight relevant information about this website. Feel free to use this tool to discuss, annotate, or ask questions regarding the site content there!
This is how the hypothes.is buttons look like:
Press the top arrow to display the sidebar.
Otherwise, feel free to open an issue on the GitHub repository, and someone will try and get back to you as soon as possible or simply shoot us an e-mail!
The contact information of the instructors is as follows:
Name |
Email address |
|---|---|
Michael Ernst (He/Him) |
|
Lucie Binder (She/Her) |
|
Nariman Utegaliyev (He/Him) |
|
Jannika Hollmann (She/Her) |
|
How do we address one another?
When contacting us, please refrain from using honoraries and formal language, our first name or “you” is fine as long as the content is respectful, fair, and constructive (we aim for the same when we reply). However, please let us know if you have a preferred way of interacting with other folks, including how you would like to be addressed, your pronouns, and the level of formality.