Companion Tools for Open-Source Tools for Training Resources (OTTR).
Intro to ottrpal package
ottrpal
converts an OTTR course (Open-source Tools for Training Resources) into a files ready for upload to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): Coursera and Leanpub.
- Go to the main OTTR guide for how to start creating courses with OTTR.
- Read the ottrpal package documentation here.
Using the example repository:
If you'd like to use our example repository you can fork it on Github and clone it to your own computer Follow these instructions to fork and then you can clone it using a command like:
git clone https://github.com/{organization}/OTTR_Quizzes.git
But replace {organization}
with the location of your forked repository.
Installing ottrpal:
You can install ottrpal
from GitHub with:
install.packages("ottrpal")
If you want the development version (not advised) you can install using the remotes
pacakge to install from GitHub.
if (!("remotes" %in% installed.packages())) {
install.packages("remotes")
}
remotes::install_github("jhudsl/ottrpal")
Running ottrpal
The ottrpal
package converts your files using one of these main functions:
ottrpal::bookdown_to_embed_leanpub()
By default, ottrpal
will re-run a bookdown::render_book("index.Rmd")
rendering of your chapters first before converting the files to the Leanpub ready format. However, if you wish to skip this step, you can set render = FALSE
when running the ottrpal::bookdown_to_embed_leanpub()
function.
About the Book.txt file:
Leanpub requires a Book.txt
file to know what order the chapters/quizzes should be published.
By default, your Book.txt
file will not be autogenerated but ottrpal
will look in your given directory for an existing Book.txt
file which it will copy over to the output directory.
You can create a Book.txt
file manually, or if your quizzes and chapters are numbered, ottrpal
can create the Book.txt
file based on the numbers going from low to high and quizzes following chapters of the same number. (e.g. quiz_03.md
will be placed after 03-some_chapter_file.Rmd
).
To have ottrpal
attempt to autogenerate this file, set make_book_txt
to TRUE
.
ottrpal::bookdown_to_embed_leanpub(make_book_txt = TRUE)
If no Book.txt
file is found and make_book_txt
is set to FALSE
(this is the default setting), ottrpal
will fail.
A ottrpal autogenerated Book.txt
file might look something like this:
index.Rmd
01-chapter.Rmd
quiz_1.md
02-chapter.Rmd
quiz_2.md
about.Rmd
Also note that any index.Rmd
will always be placed first and any about.Rmd
file will be placed last.
Setting up quizzes:
By default, ottrpal will look for a folder called quizzes/
to find your quiz .md
files. If your quizzes are located somewhere else, you will need to use the quiz_dir
argument to specify that:
ottrpal::bookdown_to_embed_leanpub(quiz_dir = "some_directory")
About the output files
Leanpub's Github writing mode will look for a directory called manuscript
to publish from. You should not edit the files in manuscript/
by hand since a re-run of ottrpal
will cause your changes to be overwritten.
Adding footer text:
If there is text you would like added to the end of each chapter (like a link to a feedback survey for example), you can supply a character string to the footer_text
argument in the main ottrpal::bookdown_to_leanpub()
function.
# Set up a character string
survey_link <- "Please provide any feedback you have by filing a GitHub issue [here](https://github.com/jhudsl/OTTR_Template/issues)"
# Supply the footer text in the main function
ottrpal::bookdown_to_embed_leanpub(footer_text = survey_link)