Charting the landscape

The landscape of tools for authoring and publishing training material is vast, and creating new or upgrading legacy material may appear daunting in the face of all available options. This roadmap surveys the landscape and provides actionable guidelines for publishing modern online training materials with state-of-the-art tools. We focus on Publishing workflows that use standard authoring artefacts (such as plain text, tables and figures) that can generate multiple publishing outputs (like slides, websites, pdfs, or documents).

The proliferation and adoption of the World Wide Web has allowed the modernisation of teaching material that is cross-platform and dynamic. Examples of modern teaching material include online videos (e.g. Khan Academy), online exams (e.g. Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs), personal blogs with commenting facilities, and animated or interactive illustrations. However, large parts of the currently available teaching material still focus on printable formats, with the possible addition of hyperlinks for online delivery.

The lack of standards for publishing hinders the adoption of authoring formats and increases the efforts to improve individual publishing workflows. Furthermore, the time spent getting familiar with one technology may not be productive in future with the rapidly changing publishing environment. Additionally, multiple publishing outputs require different input formats which forces the duplication of efforts to produce very similar material (e.g. printed pdf, website, blog post, slides, posters).

This roadmap provides an introduction to modern Authoring tools and Formatting tools. We explore the most broadly adopted authoring and publishing platforms, as well as online collaboration tools to facilitate the creation of shared online material. We pay special attention to the possible standardisation of a workflow to minimise the effort of authoring artefacts while maximizing the range of output modalities. Two such publishing systems are Jupyter Book and Quarto for which multiple examples are provided.

We also provide some use-case examples of a full workflow to generate online training material (and this website is in fact one of them). All material is kept in the GitHub version control environment to maximise transparency and reproducibility while allowing the automatic generation of the output artefacts with GitHub Actions. The input artefact is constructed in such a way that multiple types of output formats can be generated automatically from them (e.g. formats like an HTML website, reveal.js slides, online or print PDFs, and e-books).