Existing software

Here we list some existing software and platforms for open format courses (open webslides, Jupyter notebooks etc.), annotations and discussion forums. Feel free to provide further input.

Open format courses

GitHub

GUIs for making open webslides

• visual editor for making slides named Slides
• visual editor for making slides named Shower
• visual editor for making slides named Deck
• visual editor for making slides named Impress (this is a very nice demo)
• make slides with IPython
• make slides that allow for code to run online in the slides with RISE
• switch between slide templates with reveal.js (used by Jupyter notebooks to make slides)

On Jupyter notebooks

• a simple way to share Jupyter Notebooks: nbviewer
• check out an example

Discussion and interaction among students

• interact with fellow students on a course text and the interaction is automatically graded: Perusall
• online course text by ACCO with interactive discussion and multimedia: Sofia
• frequently used platform for discussion: Piazza
• group assignments: Google docs

Annotations

Freely available on the web

• annotate and highlight anything on the web with Diigo
• prevent digital scanning and annotate/summarize with the Chrome add-on UseClark
• annotations and editing of video material using Panopto
• suite of collaborative web-based annotation tools currently under development at MIT Annotation Studio
• more samples are available online, like in this top 5

Interesting GitHub combinations

• quick-and-dirty documentation generator Docco (notes that you add to the slides can be used to automatically generate a textbook draft)
• open source GitHub project called Annotator

Currently lacking

• a good tool for taking digital notes during the lecture? By having digital notes, students can easily share and compare notes without having to copy notes or figure out each other’s hand writing.

Miscellaneous

Inspiration

• example of iMindsX course by Stefaan Cottenier (see our network of contributors)
• example of strong international visibility: dr. Joel Guerrero has an amazing course about computational fluid dynamics his slides/tutorials are used by a great deal of people, including UGent researchers.
• insightful video on lessons learned from teaching programming by Greg Wilson

Overviews of tools

• some publishers like O'Reilly offer digital courses too
• conversion to other formats with Pandoc
• Flemish repository for digital teaching tools digitale didactiek
• list of online tools Onderwijstools

Sharing course material with other teachers

• repository for courses at Flemish high schools KlasCement

Open questions

• can these tools be integrated with other platforms or are they closed/stand-alone?
• is it just another app or platform, causing more fragmentation of the course material?
• is it possible to integrate any of our ideas with social media such as Facebook and Twitter?
• is it possible to integrate any of this with CAS and/or Minerva?