I am trying to tidy up a student/faculty project made possible by the UNBC OER Development
Grant
https://www.unbc.ca/centre-teaching-and-learning/oer-development-grant and thought
I’d put this question out in the event anyone else has encountered this type of
challenge.
I have an extensive Organic Chemistry workbook (with solutions) that is a new ancillary
resource for an adapted Organic Chemistry opentextbook.
All the chapters in this workbook correspond to the chapters in the adapted open
textbook.
There previously was no associated workbook for this resource. The faculty member
assembled questions for all the chapters and worked with a student to confirm all of the
solutions.
The problem is … the student completed all of these solutions on paper and then scanned
the entire workbook into a PDF.
This is a great resource, but I really think it the solutions need to be provided as
markup rather than images.
I have chemfig
https://ctan.org/pkg/chemfig working with ShareLaTex
https://www.sharelatex.com/learn/Chemistry_formulae but I expect having a student complete
the markup for all of these chemistry diagrams (hundreds) may not be possible as the
learning curve will likely be too to ask of a student. Even if I did find a student
capable of taking this on, I expect it would take many hours over months to complete.
I also have been exploring using Binder
https://mybinder.org/ and Jupyter Notebooks for
this
http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/gist/greglandrum/4316430. This is a great option for
ensuring shareable/editable markup, but again there is a learning curve for this that may
be prohibitive for most students.
I really feel like markup should be generated for these diagrams to avoid creating
hundreds of images. I feel that generating the markup will allow easier
adaptation/editing of the resources, but at the same time aware that there is a
significant learning curve involved for the person taking this on.
Anyone working with rending diagrams with markup? If so, what worked/failed?
Cheers ~ Grant
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Grant Potter
UNBC Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology
http://unbc.ca/ctlt
http://twitter.com/unbc_ctlt