It is always wonderful to reconnect with graduate school friends. Last year when I was at the Open Ed 2021 conference doing my session, I noticed a familiar name. Tonight, I watched their recorded session entitled “A Freely Hosted and Easily Maintained OER for an Undergraduate Agile Software Engineering Course” with Cengiz Gunay, an associate professor, and Anca Doloc-Mihu, an assistant professor, both at Georgia Gwinnett College. Cengiz and I know each other from Emory when I was in graduate school. I have since found him at other OER/Open events including OERbandcamp! Gunay and Doloc-Mihu created an OER for an Agile Software Engineering Course. The software is simple, easy to maintain, and can be modified. They designed it to be a platform for content and interaction. The slides are part of the website. Students don’t need to open PowerPoint or a PDF, and the slides can be viewed on mobile devices. The GitHub site is used to host the content. The code for the book is there and creates an HTML website. The technology they used is Hugo which takes the content and creates the HTML. The text files are easy to modify and include the metadata. To create slide decks, a Hugo command is used. The slides can be created and animated with simple text commands. Gunay also showed us how to use Github to “fork” and make a copy of the site. The site and book are really easy to navigate: I wonder if this could be a student project to create or transfer content to this format with the goal of making it available and adaptable? The syntax doesn’t seem that difficult to learn. Cengiz also made me think about learning more about Hugo. This week I also saw a beautiful and professional example of the use of PubPub for the NC State “Wicked” course (and also the Fermentology series). It is tempting to start a new Delftia book using a different platform!
