A Technologist's Agenda for Scriptable, Smart, Social, and Republishable Courses

Abstract

This position paper describes the personal agenda of a lesser-known technologist and academic, who has been working on smart and social education technology since the early 2000s. Since 2015, I have also been the coordinator for a bachelor-level computer science degree at a regional Australian university with a small on-campus cohort and larger online cohort. Market pressures encourage us to pursue greater flexibility in modes and times of study, greater authenticity in how study relates to industrial practice, and greater connectivity in how our systems and studies interact with those of the wider community. As a technologist, this also motivates me to draw from four previous projects, to try to create technologies and techniques to make this ever-greater flexibility viable for a small computer science teaching team. By combining techniques from these projects, I aim to produce a small open source set of utilities to support publishing of smart, social, courses that support authentic tasks and can run and be managed in a variety of formats.