Fastpages - Rapid Courseware Authoring

In your move to wholly online don’t count on full video streaming and synchronous collaborative tools. With everybody working from home and using these tools bandwidth is going to vary and be unreliable. You need to return to providing a text based alternative. This is where fastpages comes to the rescue. If you know github and markdown and have a heap of existing Jupyter notebooks, you’ll find fastpages a great way to rapidly publish your content as a blog on Github pages.

What can you do?

  • Rapid authoring

    You don’t need to be copying and pasting content into the uni provided LMS - no need to create folder by folder and upload file by file one at a time. You can use the tools you already know and be productive using existing jupyter notebooks, word docs, markdown, latex. Behind the scenes using github actions and Jekyll, static files are rendered and deployed to github pages. You can still link to the site from within your LMS but improve your productivity and take the load off the uni provided LMS.

  • Great for Programming or Data Science Tutorial

    Interactive charts using Altair are rendered. Syntax highlighting and folding available for code.

  • Easy media integration

    Easily embed images and youtube videos.

  • Full Taxonomy support

    Tags and categories are supported

  • Full search support

    Many LMS don’t even have this feature! Students will be able to search for content.

  • Support for comments on each page

    Made possible via github issues. A great way for students to ask questions.

To get started:

  1. Preview the Demo site.
  2. Watch the setup video.
  3. Follow the instructions for creating your own course site.