Git Courseware is a Jekyll Theme specifically designed for the creation and publishing of OER Textbooks. The theme has custom layouts and navigation design to allow course creators to create fully online textbooks with little or no code required while leveraging all of the features of GitHub's collaborative development process and version control.
This project was originally created by Dr. Mark Samberg for use in his online courses. The project was expanded thanks to support from the NC State University Alt-Textbook Project.
This project specifically includes the following features for course developers:
- A home page template enabling users to select a course to view
- A course homepage with selectable units and in-unit navigation automatically generated
- YouTube embedding and included figures with no code required
- Support for course announcements and course-level persistent alerts
- A themeable design allowing for branding for your institution
One of the questions often asked of this project is why a course designer would choose to implement it over a WYSIWYG webpage creator like WordPress or Google Sites. Or why a designer would use this instead of including content in their learning management system.
The answer for both is primarily about leveraging GitHub as a tool for open design. In his paper, Defining the "Open" in Open Content and Open Educational Resources, David Wiley describes five core principles of "open" content: content that users are able to retain (i.e., download and save a copy), content that can be revised (a user can adapt and modify the work), content that can be remixed (used to create something new), content that reused for other purposes, and that all versions of the content can be redistributed.
While in both a website and an LMS, content can be copied and pasted, it is incredibly difficult to save content from a website or LMS to your computer unless it is in PDF format. Additionally, content in an LMS is restricted and often only available during a time a student is enrolled in a course. Again, because the content must be copied and pasted, it is incredibly difficult to revise or remix. Users also must create a new hosting mechanism to host this content.
Conversely, the setup of Git Courseware and GitHub allows the content to exist publicly on the Internet, for anyone who wants to download a copy of the content to be able to do so and retain it, and to leverage GitHub to host their revisions. In addition, because content is separated from presentation, the content can be remixed in any number of ways by anyone familiar with Markdown syntax.
Take a look at the template and instruction guide at https://mjsamberg.github.io/git-courseware-template/.