𝝁 🌊 course authoring for humans

Mu is for authors of online courses. It allows you to cross-compile courses from one format to another. For instance, you can write your courses in a human-friendly format, such as Markdown, and convert them to a format that can be imported in your learning management system (LMS).

Supported formats:

• Markdown: with Pandoc-flavoured header attributes.
• HTML 5
• Open Learning XML (OLX) from Open edX.

Check out the course.md file to see what an actual course in Markdown format looks like.

Installation

pip install mu-courses

Conversion from and to Markdown is handled with the help of Pandoc. Thus, a recent version of Pandoc is required when working with Markdown documents. See the corresponding installation instructions.

Usage

# Markdown -> OLX
mu /path/to/course.md /path/to/olx/
# OLX -> HTML
mu /path/to/olx/course/ /path/to/course.html
# HTML -> OLX
mu /path/to/course.html /path/to/olx/course/
...

When writing Markdown files, the generated documents will include non-standard (but widely recognized) header identifiers to store the course unit attributes.

Examples

Example courses are provided in the examples directory.

Supported unit types and formats

For each unit type, we indicate whether reading from (R) and writing to (W) the corresponding format are supported.

Unit type / Format	OLX	HTML/Markdown
Collection	✅	✅
Video	✅	✅
Free text question	✅	✅
Multiple choice question	✅	✅
Raw HTML	✅	✅

Notes and known limitations

OLX

Writer

• Multiple choice questions are always rendered as checkboxes, and not as single-choice questions.

Contributing

Setting up a development environment

Install development requirements:

pip install -r requirements/dev.txt
pip install -e .

Run tests:

make test

Reformat your code with black:

make format

Re-generate course samples:

make examples

Upgrade pinned requirements:

make upgrade-requirements

Publish a new release:

python setup sdist
twine upload dist/mu-courses*.tar.gz

How to add a new type of course unit?

Want to add a new type of content to your course? Here's a general approach:

1. Start by creating a new type of unit in the mu/units.py module.
2. Add such a unit to the examples/course.md sample file, using your desired syntax.
3. Implement the corresponding HTML reader in the mu/formats/html/reader.py module. You should draw your inspiration from the Reader.on_section method. You are strongly encouraged to add at least one unit test to tests/test_html.py.
4. Now, implement the HTML writer in the mu/formats/html/writer.py module. This should be as simple as creating a new Writer.on_yournewunitname method. Add a unit test. Verify that your writer is generating the right HTML output by running make example-html.
5. Implement the corresponding OLX reader and writer in mu/formats/olx/writer.py and mu/formats/olx/writer.py. Check that the OLX course is correctly generated when you run make example-olx.

How to add a new input/output format?

Would you like to use Mu with an LMS that is not currently supported, or with your own course format? You will need to implement two Python classes: a Reader and a Writer.

In Mu, converting from one format to another works as follows:

Reader -----------> unit.Course object ---------> Writer ------------> final path
        generates                       sent to           writes to    or directory

• The new Reader class must implement the methods from mu.formats.base.reader.BaseReader.
• The new Writer class must implement the methods from mu.formats.base.writer.BaseWriter.

You should make sure to add unit tests to the tests/ directory.

At the moment, all reader/writers must live in the mu package. In the future, we expect that it will be possible to auto-discover different reader and writer packages.

Troubleshooting

This project was created by Matthew Brett (@matthew-brett) and funded by a grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The project is maintained by Régis Behmo from Overhang.IO. Would you like to report an issue or request a feature? Then open a new GitHub issue.

License

This work is licensed under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL).