Use the Gitbook Editor Tool and Github Technology to Create an Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) Website for your Online Courses

Workshop: Use the Gitbook Editor Tool and Github Technology to Create an Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)  Website for your Online Courses

This is an Express Workshop using innovative tools and technologies.

A set of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) can provide immediate help to students who are working online and may be studying in different time zones.  It provides concise and to the point answers to questions that may predictably come up during coursework. It is a source of information that is like the sources they will be using when they leave the course and are looking to expand on what they have learned during the course.  Therefore it is an artifact that helps them “learn to learn”. In this workshop, participant will learn how to use some of the most up-to-the-minute tools to create FAQs.  With this knowledge, they will have control over the dissemination of this content and may modify or add to it at any time to make answer to questions immediately available to online students.

Github.com is the premier code collaboration space for Software Engineers and Web Developers globally.  It is a place to store and collaborate on code development. It is based on the Git application created by Linus Torvalds, who is also the creator of the open source Linux operating system.  

In recent years educators have found that Github works well in the classroom as a place to collaborate on many types of projects.  See this website for more information on Github.com and education: https://education.github.com/. Everything from writing code to writing a book can be worked on as a team (or individually) on the Github.com platform.

In addition to managing documents and code in a Github.com repository, Github.com makes it possible to host a website for free on it’s Github.io platform.  Static web pages that are loaded into a Github.com repository can be made available on the world wide web with a small amount of configuration.

Gitbook is a website which provides a tool to create and host content.  With Gitbook, you can prepare documentation for a process or the use of code, write a book, or compose a set of Frequently Asked Questions.  Text and images are entered as Markdown using a tool that is much like a word processor. Users never really have to work with either the Markdown, nor the HTML language to work in Gitbook.  When the content is ready to be published Gitbook will turn the Markdown into HTML and make it available for public reading.

In this workshop, we’ll work through the process of creating FAQs using the Gitbook Editor, the Github.com repository, and the Github.io hosting engine.  At the end of the workshop, participant will be able to create their own FAQ’s as well as be ready to work on other content formats.  They will be able to host this content on the World Wide Web.

Slides will be provided that walk the participant through the process of creating the FAQ.  The slides and directions for the preparation below can be posted on the conference website prior to the conference.  

In order to work on this, participants will need to do some set up using code and resources from the internet.  Some of this can be done during the workshop, but the more that is done before the workshop, the more there will be time to focus on creating and building the FAQs.

The following installations are free and can be done prior to the workshop.  It takes about ½ hour to this.

• Create a Github.com account

• Download the Gitbook editor

• Download Visual Studio Cod This is where the FAQ can be built with the gitbook program

• Download and install Node

• Install “gitbook-cli”

• Bring a laptop with the code downloaded from above

• To publish to Github.com and make available for Github.io, participants need internet access

My presentation will involve sharing the process of creating the FAQs with slides. I will walk through the steps to create the FAQs and be available to help participant if they run into problems.

Participants who successfully create the FAQs will be in a position to teach their colleagues and students how to do this.  The same process can be used to write and publish a book, so this process helps with the creation of many types of content.

Participants and their students who are able to integrate with Github.com will be in a position to collaborate on many projects and share in a global social network that hold ideas and technology that power our world.

Here is an an example of an FAQ that I use for my courses: https://suwebdev.github.io/wats-lab-faq/