Re: Create course material with org-mode

[Brian van den Broek <brian.van.den.broek@gmail.com>]

On 9 March 2013 17:21, Torsten Wagner <torsten.wagner@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I plan to create new course materials for teaching at university level.

<snip>

> I'm looking for a system which enables me to keep all materials together and
> to reuse as much as possible the same source files.
>
> E.g., for a particular topic, I would love to create all the above materials
> within a single file. This would help me to keep it among all materials
> coherent, correct errors and do updates effectively and save (hopefully) a
> lot of time.


Hi Torsten,

I thought I'd muddy your waters by throwing a contrary voice into the mix :-)

I've been refining the way I manage my college and uni teaching with
org for 5+ years, now. I am making extensive use of the scheduling and
TODO functionality. I am not storing course materials in the org
files. I found that I could not get by with just one teaching.org
file, but instead needed to break out each class into its own org
file. With everything in one, even on my pretty beefy box (quad core
i7, 8GB RAM) there was too much of a periodic lag when editing the org
file for that to be comfortable. On my netbook (which I take to the
office as the College insists I need a Windows box on my desk), the
lag made working with the file far too painful. I've not tried putting
my (extensive) LaTeX beamer slides sources, exams, etc. into the org
files, but I fear the lag would again occur.

I've been keeping all course related material other than the org files
which manage scheduling into a seperate directory under git version
control and I link from the org file's scheduled tasks to the relevant
course related materials. It seems to be working in that I am halfway
through the term and am at most a week behind :-) Having those
materials in nested dirs in the filesystem is helpful, too; it allows
granular use of things like $git log . and that often gives me a
better sense of what I've been up to than would running git log
against one monster all in org file.

I don't however too much by way of multiple outputs derived from
common sources. I let LaTeX beamer's facilities take care of prodicing
a display and a downloadable version of my slides. That just needs two
short master files which \include the body of the slides. What
duplication I have is in things like tests and paper topics when I
have multiple sections of the same course in a term, differing only in
section numbers and dates. The duplication is a bit inellegant, but it
is not extensive enough for me to worry about the overhead of avoiding
it. And, disk space is approximately free, at least if one is worried
about having duplicates of latex sources that generate a few pages.

HTH,

Brian vdB