Hey everyone
Yesterday I investigated the possibility of using Jekyll for courses. I did this from the perspective of archiving courses.
This is the result from a quick attempt and I thought it might be worth sharing some thoughts.
Using jekyll for archiving
We can do this, although I’m sceptic of the value that we gain by exporting it as jekyll pages rather than static HTML. The benefit of the static HTML will be that we retain the look. The benefit of the jekyll version would be that we get the meat of courses (content, comments, etc) in a juicier format. We can always export static HTML and export courses to some format like YAML or JSON.
Capturing all the data from courses in front matter would require a bit of work, but completely possible. Tweaking the layout for courses to be acceptable - not loose to much of the old stuff may be trickly, but possible too.
Using jekyll for stand alone courses
This can work! We create a basic skeleton project that people can clone to create courses. Creating the course would require them modify the config file, create a disqus account, tweak layout and add content in markdown, textile or html format.
It does however make a big technical ask of people, they need to use git, edit markdown files and optionally fiddle a little with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. That does also mean that those who can gain the complete benefit of creating for the web - stuff like adding interactive things in your course, etc.
I’m fairly optimistic that we can create this in a short timeframe (a week). And then see if people are willing to take the plunge. Making it easier for people to do could be really hard to do.
