In my teaching this year, I'm going to avoid course management software like Courseworks and Blackboard entirely, and build my own little password-protected site, for the practice.
I've posted the syllabus publicly as HTML5 (20150809: now deleted), the first time I've
attempted to use that format. I constructed it using the wonderful
Markdown language, which I converted to HTML5 using Landslide.
Landslide is very convenient and (in v. 1.0.1) was easy to install and
operate. I also tried using Pandoc (v. 1.5.1.1, via apt-get on
Ubuntu 10.04; newer versions have unworkable dependencies) with the
-w slidy option, but Landslide looks much better, at least with the
default options.
Two small matters in Landslide v. 1.0.1, which I've reported as issues:
- Not all of the functionality is described in the README file; .qr, for example, is currently only described in one of the sample files (https://github.com/adamzap/landslide/blob/master/samples/example1/slides.md).
- Although ordinary Chinese text in Unicode displays correctly, high codepoints (represented in UTF-8 as surrogate pairs) do not. High codepoints are rare, but the failure of software to handle them correctly is not.
Thanks to Norm Kabir and WES Skeith for the inspiration of their own markdown-based course materials.
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