A worked example: turning a lecture website into a live course

Plenty of teachers already publish their material. A GitHub Pages site with the syllabus, the delivery plan and the slide decks is a perfectly good way to hand notes to a class.

What it cannot do is take work back.

What a static site gives you

Using a real example — a Research Methodology course with six units, 44 scheduled sessions, per-lecture slide decks, two class tests and homework for every lecture:

• Students can read the plan and download the slides.
• The homework is listed under each lecture.
• Tick-boxes for "done" live in the student's own browser and are invisible to the tutor.

That last point is the whole problem. The site can publish, but it cannot collect, grade, or tell you who is falling behind.

What changes when the same material is a course

The mapping is more direct than people expect:

1. 1Units become sections. Six units, in order, each with its own description. Add a section for the class tests and one for revision.
2. 2Lectures become widgets inside a section. A heading, a text widget with the topic and learning outcome, a PDF widget for the deck, and a notes callout for the homework.
3. 3Slide decks become PDF widgets. Uploaded once, downloadable, no external link to keep alive.
4. 4The delivery plan becomes real dates. Each lecture carries its own date, day and venue, so a student who missed a week knows precisely what they missed.
5. 5Quizzes become assessments. A 25-question multiple-choice quiz with explanations becomes a real test: auto-marked, timed, with the explanation shown afterwards.
6. 6Homework becomes required items. Which turns "here is the homework" into "here is who has done the homework".

What you gain

• Submissions. A quiz taken on the site tells you nothing. A quiz taken in the course fills your gradebook.
• A marksheet that maintains itself. Every auto-marked question and every grade you type feeds it.
• Attendance tied to the same class list as everything else.
• Private messages, so a student asking about their own mark is not doing it in a group chat.
• Batch reuse. Next year, archive the cohort's work and clear it. The course structure, slides and quizzes stay.

What it costs you

An afternoon, mostly spent uploading PDFs and pasting quiz questions. The structure itself — six units, forty-four lectures — is about fifteen minutes with the Units shape and the duplicate button.

Keep the public site. It is a good front door. The course is where the work happens.