
System for making LaTeX teaching material

Rationale

   As a teacher at TAFE and at the Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education,
   I wanted to create a system that would allow me to start teaching a new
   topic quickly and easily. The aims:
     * Use LaTeX
     * Want it customisable, with good quality
     * Produce video slides, handouts and transparencies from one source
     * Enable the handouts to contain additional material, such as workshop
       exercises, or questions for the students to answer to test their own
       understanding during the class
     * Ease  of management: want to be able to quickly start a new topic,
       quickly be able to build everything.

   I originally used [1]seminar, then [2]Prosper, then [3]HA-prosper, and
   finally [4]LaTeX Beamer. I settled on using LaTeX Beamer because it allows
   the use of normal LaTeX commands and allows much greater flexibility than
   its predecessors. It is also actively developed.

Download

   [5]teaching-template-system-0.2.tar.bz2

How to use it

Initial Customisation

     * Untar the files
     * Edit the files:
          + [6]template/beamer-slide-header.tex
          + [7]template/template.tex
       replacing my name with your name, removing other authors, choosing a
       suitable layout, and doing whatever you like to customise to your own
       liking.

Starting a New Teaching Topic

   To begin a new teaching topic, in the top level directory containing a
   Makefile, do:
   make my-topic-name

   This will create a subdirectory my-topic-name containing the contents of the
   template directory with the headings edited to my-topic-name.

   You    then    go    into   that   directory   and   edit   the   file
   my-topic-name/my-topic-name.tex.

   Typing make in that directory will produce three pdf files and a postscript
   file:

   my-topic-name-beamer.pdf
          the slides to show using a video projector

   my-topic-name-handout.pdf
          a pdf file suitable for printing as a handout to the students

   my-topic-name-handout.ps
          The same, ready to send to a postscript capable printer.

   my-topic-name-trans.pdf
          the slides suitable for printing to transparencies, if there is no
          video projector available.

   If you type
   make

   in the top level directory, then it will bring all the teaching material in
   all the subdirectories up to date, compiling anything that it is necessary
   to compile.

Browse the Files

   You can [8]browse the files.

Support

   This  system is supported. Please write to [9]Nick Urbanik and ask any
   questions you like about this system and how to adapt it to your needs.

License

   All this system is licensed under the Gnu General Public License (GPL)


References

   1. http://www.tug.org/applications/Seminar/
   2. http://prosper.sourceforge.net/
   3. http://stuwww.uvt.nl/~hendri/Downloads/haprosper.html
   4. http://latex-beamer.sourceforge.net/
   5. http://nicku.org/teaching-template-system/teaching-template-system-0.2.tar.bz2
   6. http://nicku.org/teaching-template-system/template/beamer-slide-header.tex
   7. http://nicku.org/teaching-template-system/template/template.tex
   8. http://nicku.org/teaching-template-system-source/
   9. mailto:nicku@nicku.org
