Non-Carpentries examples using GitHub and websites to develop interactive learning:

Integrated Musicianship

Sean Butterfield of University of Idaho, with support of the Think Open Fellowship and Evan Williamson, created an interactive music textbook:

• Integrated Musicianship: Theory
• IntMus Theory source code on GitHub
• Interactive features:
  • Live note taking during class discussion (e.g. Labeling Pitches). Student learning becomes part of the textbook!
  • abcjs enables live editable music examples in the text (e.g. Happy Birthday in G major).
  • Disqus (discussion around assignments, e.g. Unit 4 assignment)

Freed from many of the limitations of a conventionally published text, we were able to add innovative features to enrich the learning experience and flexibly adapt to the needs of the course and students. Importantly, these interactive features and responsive workflow in creating the textbook compliment the philosophy of inquiry-based learning, a “flipped-classroom” driven by students’ exploration and examination of the subject. In this case, GitHub provides an ideal platform not only for project management, collaboration, and sharing source code, but also for implementing an actively evolving textbook informed by an inquiry-based pedagogical method.

Workshops

Evan’s workshops (like this one) use GitHub Pages and a Jekyll template to create a simple workshop website. It works best for about 5 pages of instructions, plus index, all written in Markdown. The navigation to the main pages is exposed at top and bottom of each page for easy stepping through the lessons. The web-based content is easier to follow along with conveniently shared code and links. Plus, it is easy to fork and adapt!

• workshop-template, minimal version.
• workshop-template-b, template with a Bootstrap theme and fontawesome for a slicker look.

Workshops:

• Make OER! (presentation)
• get-git
• go-go gh-pages
• hello-arduino