Synchronous lecture materials. How?

February 23rd, 2008 by jose

The efficient academic google group has a thread on a really interesting problem. Any hack addressing this has a high chance of saving several hours per week for those of you who teach.

Given lecture material has three components:

  1. Slides for digital projection (preferable PDFs rather than PowerPoint or Keynote)
  2. Lecture notes to support what I need to say and remember
  3. Lecture handout

I regularly update all three, but I am finding keeping all three in sync to be a bit tedious.

I’m not sure what the solution is, but what I am visualising is some sort of single document, where you  write the lecture handout. I could then update this with new information between presenting the lecture.

If you have a solution, drop by and post it there (or here!).


About the author: Jose Quesada wanted to be a matador, an acrobatic pilot, or a painter, but found those activities not demanding enough, so he chose an academic career. He secretly hopes to orchestrate a system that produces papers without any human intervention (particularly, his).


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4 Responses to “Synchronous lecture materials. How?”

  1. Chaim KrauseNo Gravatar Says:

    Docbook + XSLT + PDF Creator with some Python glue.

  2. Will RobertsonNo Gravatar Says:

    LaTeX is pretty ideal for this sort of thing. Take a look at the beamer package; it contains several methods to help with slides plus auxiliary content.

  3. jim lg Says:

    my school has started making slides on http://www.voicethread.com which allows for easy sychronization and collaboration on lectures

  4. George TziralisNo Gravatar Says:

    Maybe this is not what you are looking for exactly, but you may find it interesting:
    I’m trying to teach a data mining course by using a blog to post lecture notes and assignments, to live stream the lectures force students to post their assignments on a weekly basis.
    Here is the link: http://dataminingcourse.wordpress.com (well, apologies, it’s in greek :)
    and here you can find more info in english: http://dataminingntua.wordpress.com/2008/02/27/acoursebyblog/

    Blogging is not synchronous by its strict definition, by it’s kind-of direct and dynamic for sure, right?

    P.S: Just found your blog, pretty amazed that found something so straight to the point, keep up :)

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