Re: Create course material with org-mode

[Torsten Wagner <torsten.wagner@gmail.com>]

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Hi Brian,

Hi Torsten,
>
> I thought I'd muddy your waters by throwing a contrary voice into the mix
> :-)
>
>
NOOOO do not destroy my view of a perfect world.... ;)


> 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.
>

Actually, that might be misunderstood. My aim is not to create a
teaching.org file but many org-files, one for each topic. I totally agree a
single org-mode file for an entire course would be really fast difficult to
maintain.
A complete course might consist of many org-files. Splitting the entire
lecture in a similar way like an ordinary table of content.
However, I would love to keep all infos of a certain topic within a single
org-mode file together. Slides, lecture notes, exam questions, exercises,
organisation, TODOs, ideas, maybe code, etc.



> 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.
>

GIT will be definitely part of my toolchain independent of the usage of
org-mode.


>
> 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.
>
>
Actually, that is exactly what I am trying to figure out at the moment. How
to generate a entire script or lecture slides from different org-mode files
which contain not only one sort buy many different sorts of information.

Thanks for the input, I guess  we are more on the the same path rather then
contrary. ;)

Best

Torsten

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