Learning Management Systems (LMSs) traditionally have a reputation for poor usability or limited feature set. As an alternative, a course website may be published using GitHub Pages. In this case, the course website serves as a centralized “landing page” with the syllabus, schedule, descriptions of assignments, etc. A major benefit of this approach is that the course website can embrace modern web principles, such as responsive design, which addresses the aforementioned usability issues.

Deadline
Lesson 2
Expected duration
1 hour
Submission
the Learning Management System (LMS)

Learning Objectives

  • Create a course website that uses Jekyll
  • Publish the course website using GitHub Pages

Instructions

Use the following steps to create a course website based on this template:

  1. Create a GitHub account if you don’t have one already: https://github.com/join

  2. Initialize a Git repository for the course website. (You may also use an existing Git repository, but be mindful of overwriting existing files.)

    git init course-website && cd course-website

  3. Copy the contents of the jekyll-course-site repository:1

    wget https://github.com/joel-coffman/jekyll-course-site/archive/HEAD.tar.gz
tar xfvz HEAD.tar.gz --strip-components=1 && rm HEAD.tar.gz

  4. Commit the files from the template:

    git commit --all
  5. Update the site with course-specific information (course name, title, description, etc.). Don’t forget to commit your changes!
  6. Create a GitHub repository for the course website.
  7. Push the changes from the local to the remote (GitHub) repository by following the instructions to “…or push an existing repository from the command line.”
  8. Configure GitHub Pages for your GitHub repository (instructions).
  9. (Optional) Add the jekyll-course-site repository as a remote to facilitate cherry-picking future changes.

Submission

Create an archive of your Git repository (you can use “Code” button when viewing your GitHub repository for this purpose) and submit that archive to the Learning Management System (LMS).

  1. This step may also be performed manually by downloading a ZIP archive of the repository and copying all the files (including hidden files). ↩