eLearning Africa 2023

LiaScript • May 24, 2023

Instant Creation & Publishing of Free and Open Online Courses with LiaScript

LiaScript is a language-based approach to free and open education. This workshop will demonstrate how LiaScript can be used to create sustainable and extendable open educational resources (OER) that are interactive, engaging, and even work offline. In contrast to complex user-interfaces and memorising lots of point and click events, participants will work with simple text-files only.

LiaScript is based on Markdown, which is founded on ideas around simplicity, adaptability and extendibility. Visual and textual metaphors are used instead of coding to define quizzes, surveys, presentations, animations, and text-to-speech output. Courses created with LiaScript can be presented as a fully interactive textbook, a presentation or YouTube-like screencast format. Participants will learn the basics of Markdown for publishing and the general LiaScript idea. This includes exploring how to create animations, content in different languages, different styles of quizzes and surveys, integrate multimedia content, automated data-visualization and interactive programming. You will be introduced to the basics of version-management and open-source to enable you to publish your course immediately through GitHub. Finally, you will learn how to create class-rooms and how to export your content into an SCORM or IMS packages. This will enable uploads to most Learning Management Systems (LMS), or translated to Android, IOS, Windows applications, and standalone Web-projects.

Prerequisite Knowledge:

Your own laptop is required, previous knowledge of how to edit a text-file is useful in creating an interactive learning experience.

Expected Outcomes:

Learn how to create completely interactive and free online courses with LiaScript/Markdown.
You will be introduced to the basics of git/GitHub (a version management system), which enables multi-authorship, versioning (in different languages), and free hosting of courses.
Additionally you will learn how easy it is to apply web 3.0 technologies for sharing educational content in a decentralized manner.