📄️ Morea's pedagogical pattern
Morea implements a simple pedagogical pattern along with a combination of technologies (git, GitHub, Jekyll) that facilitiate development, maintenance, and collaboration. Here are some of the key features of the pattern.
📄️ Morea entity types
This section documents the structure and behavior of the five Morea entity types.
📄️ Check for broken links
You can easily check your site for broken links prior to publication.
📄️ The _config.yml file
The _config.yml file provides configuration information to Jekyll. The Morea Framework uses this file to provide important configuration information.
📄️ Equation support
MathJax is a popular package for rendering LaTeX-style equations in HTML. Morea provides built-in support for MathJax, so that you can write LaTeX equations in your Markdown files and have it render appropriately.
📄️ Overview files
Morea allows the instructor to define "overview files" whose content is inserted at the top of the six standard pages (Prerequisites, Modules, Outcomes, Readings, Experiences, Assessments).
📄️ Navigation bar configuration
The six standard navbar menu items can be enabled or disabled through the top-level _config.yml file. Here is an example:
📄️ Private files
In many cases, you might want to keep files in your repository that are not made a part of the published website.
📄️ Linking within Morea
You may wish to reference one Morea page from another. For example, you might want to link to one Readings page from another Readings page, or to an Experience from an Assessment.
📄️ Formatting code
You have several options when it comes to presenting code in your repository.
📄️ Schedule page
Overview
📄️ Include files
Jekyll allows you to create small page fragments that you can include in multiple places on your site using the include file syntax. Include files can be passed parameters, which enables a simple kind of macro language that you can use to simplify your Morea content.
📄️ Embed video
YouTube videos are easy to embed into Readings or other Morea pages.
📄️ Icons
Module icons
📄️ Tables
In Morea, you can create tables using standard markdown. For example:
📄️ Admonitions (Call outs)
Admonitions, otherwise known as "call outs", are a very useful documentation pattern. In Morea, you can create admonitions in a few different ways by combining Bootstrap alerts, font awesome icons, and markdown. Here are a few examples to get you started.
📄️ Dependabot Alerts
GitHub has a security mechanism called Dependabot, which scans repositories to check for dependencies that have known security issues.
📄️ Google Analytics
If you are interesting in tracking usage of your pages, Morea supports Google Analytics.
📄️ Themes
Because variety is the spice of life, Morea provides a set of pre-built themes that you can use to modify the look (colors and fonts) for your site. These themes are based upon the Bootswatch themes for Bootstrap.
📄️ Advanced customization
As the name implies, "Morea" provides you with mechanisms to define modules, outcomes, readings, experiences, and assessments.
📄️ Updating to a new version
Occasionally we will publish a new version of the template repository (https://github.com/morea-framework/morea/). For example, Bootstrap is updated regularly with new features, and to take advantage of them, we need to produce new versions of our theme files inside the template repository that include the new version of Bootstrap. We will make a News announcement detailing the new version and what features it contains.
📄️ Related work
Another way to understand Morea is by contrasting it with other tools used by educators to create course content.