About This Website
This website is part of a series of resources to help teachers from around the world create the foundation for free and open intelligent textbooks.
There are many ways to store intelligent textbooks on a website. Many of our teachers don't want to pay a hosting service for hosting their content. Since GitHub Pages is free, we focussed on GitHub Pages publishing tools that support Markdown, code highlighting and equations on GitHub.
When we gave ChatGPT the following requirements:
- Content is stored in Markdown format
- Easy publishing to GitHub pages
- Ability to format code
- Ability to format equations
Here is the summary of ChatGPT's recommendation:
MkDocs with the Material Theme is the most aligned with your requirements due to its simplicity, robust features, and ease of deployment to GitHub Pages. It handles code highlighting and mathematical formulas gracefully and has a straightforward configuration process.
We have also found the mkdocs-material support extreamly good, with our questions often being answered within hours.
Because of the close match of mkdocs-material's features with our intelligent textbook requirements, we have created about 20 sample websites that test these tools. We have also found that mkdocs-material can be quickly extended to support the features we need in advanced intelligent textbooks.
Note that these tools generate a 2.9 level intelligent textbook. THis is up to but does not include personalization to the knowledge of the student. This gets your textbook ready to move to level 3, where a knowledge graph of what concepts they are aware of are used to generate personalized content.
We hope the glossary and tutorials we provide are useful.