Share your knowledge and build online courses with simple Markdown!

No Tooling

You only need a browser or at least a text-editor, that's it ...

Open-Source

Create, adapt, translate, and share courses on github ...

JavaScript Ready

Extend your course with any available JavaScript library!

VS-Code

Write faster, easier, and better courses with the Visual-Studio-Code editor.

No Tooling (no programming)

Your course is parsed and rendered in real-time within the browser at client-side. You only have to provide the URL to your course file. A course is a simple Markdown format with support for multimedia content, narrators, effect, quizzes, online programming, ASCII-art diagrams, etc.

See the documentation here

Open-courSe

You are the owner of your content, but by hosting your course on github you give others the chance to contribute to, to translate, to adapt to your course.
There is no single source of truth, so why should there be only one course. With the help of git branches and forks it may be possible to develop course for different students and target audiences.

See a list of courses here

JavaScript Ready

In contrast to other Markdown-parsers you are free to use any JavaScript library you want. This way you can integrate any kind of visualization, simulation, computer-algebra-system, or whatever you might think is useful for your course.
To simplify the usage of JavaScript and HTML elements, LiaScript provides a macro-system to cover repetitive tasks.

See a list of templates here

Visual-Studio-Code

LiaScript can be developed from the Visual-Studio-Code editor, allowing to make course development much simpler and faster in the the future...
liascript-preview: Is a tiny previewer that, if it was toggled, updates the view on your course each time you save your document.
liascript-snippets: If you start typing "lia" in your document you switch on a fuzzy search, that contains a lot of LiaScript help, examples, and snippets.


Atom.io

If you prefer Atom, then you can also install a preview an a snippets plugin for this editor. The installation procedure is described in more detail here.

LiveEditor

This is a browser-based collaborative online editor for LiaScript. All content is stored within your browser. Collaboration is enabled by WebRTC and Yjs. The snippets are already included, simply type "lia" to explore some features of LiaScript. By the way, if you have a GitHub account, you can directly export your courses to gists.

Check out the editor here

... or try out some examples

More ...

liascript-devserver: If you prefer another editor or if you have a couple of courses that you want to test locally, then you should try out this open-source project...

liascript-exporter: This project allows to pack your entire course into a SCORM compliant format and thus to upload your LiaScript courses to the most common Learning Management Systems (LMS).

CodiLIA: This is a fork of the CodiMD collaborative editor for Markdown, but instead of creating documents CodiLIA can be used to create course the LiaScript-way...

preview-lia: You can also highlight your LiaScript courses or other GitHub projects on your personal website/blog with the help of this web component. Simply place the a link to your course somewhere on your site and these cards will always be in sync with your course meta-data. No need for endless updating ...

News

Updates on LiaScript are posted on Twitter or on https://aizac.herokuapp.com. For now, here are some of my favorites:

C-Programming: A clone of the Wikipedia open-book, but with editable and executable code examples

Arbeitsbuch Prolog: A transcript of a great Prolog coding book, made interactive, with quizzes, TTS, and ...

Sister fox and the gray wolf: Interactive dia-show of a russian folktale with TTS in russian. (German)

BerLearn Talk: Finally a short presentation about creating courses with LiaScript (YouTube recording)

About

I am a huge fan of online-courses (MOOCs), tutorials, YouTube-courses, podcasts, etc., BUT ... MOOCs are not in the public domain (although they should be), produced expensively by publishers, which are interested in user numbers and therefore only produce general courses for a large English speaking audience. Video and audio recordings are also hard to produce, they are “static” and one mistake or a missing fact cannot be fixed that easy.

That is why I started to develop LiaScript, as a simple and extendable Markdown-dialect that allows sharing knowledge by creating interactive courses in an Open-Source manner, where anyone can participate and contribute. Even if it is a course for a minor audience, such as teaching cuneiform writing to 8-graders in Swahili.
Like in the movie Ratatouille ... “anybody can cook”.


Source at GitHub: https://github.com/LiaScript/LiaScript


... and most of all, I hate the fact that education is still a business with private schools and universities, expensive BOOKS and MOOCS...


Share your knowledge and build online courses with simple Markdown!