Computer Aided Teaching Tool (CATool)

Author: HBF

Date: 2022-05-12

RINLab PCS WLU

Abstract: The CATool is a software tool for creating, developing, delivering, and presenting, and executing course teaching in online environment. It helps to generate course presentation contents in HTML from raw teaching materials in formats of txt, json, and markdown. It allows course instructors or developers to focus on creating the raw materials without warring about the format of presentations.

Acknowledgment:The CATool project was inspired by online course development projects supported by Faculty of Science and Center of Teaching and Learning at WLU. The CATool was developed at RINlab@WLU.

1. About CATool

CATool (or simply CAT) is a tool to create course design templates and builder programs for HTML based content presentations. It creates file system and content presentation documents of a course system of the following levels.

1. Course descriptions: syllabus, schedule, welcome, roadmap, and main index.
2. Teaching/learning materials: weekly lessons, examples, references.
3. Course work materials: labs, assignments, projects
4. Course work evaluations: marking grid, check submissions, process readme files, testing programming solutions, grade reports.

2. The CATool project

The objectives of the CATool project:

1. Standardize the course content system structures, specifications, and presentations.
2. Automate the construction of presentation/delivery contents, taking the specifications and raw materials as input, compute and generate html documents to be published/delivered to students through an online environment.
3. Automate course work evaluations in the process of checking, testing, marking, and reporting.

3. CATool data formats

CATool uses the following formats

1. Txt and HTML are used to write components of teaching and course work contents.
2. MarkDown : for writing raw contents of lessons, assignments, labs and projects.
3. JSON : for creating structured course information and specifications, and quizzes.

4. Software tools used by CATool

CATool uses the following third part software tools.

1. pandoc : tools to convert markdown document to html and other format document.
2. PHP : programming tools used by the CATool
3. JavaScript : programming tools for browser side user interface
4. Windows shell script for batch processing

5. CATool system

The CATool system has the following directories

• cat is the root directory of CATool’s programs. containing
• cat/configure.php is the main configuration program, which reads course specific configuration cat.json file to set configuration variables for CATool generations.
• cat/commands.json defines CATool operation commands and arguments, used to create command help information.
• cat/design is a directory containing php programs to generate course file system directories for lessons, assignments, labs, and release.
• cat/syllabus is a directory containing PHP programs to generate syllabus files including index[_static].html, syllabus[_static].html,schedule[_static].html, assignment[_static].html, example[_static].html,reference[_static].html, and online course (toc) top level htmls: index.html
• cat/work is a directory contains php programs to generate assignments, labs, and project(s).
• cat/mark is a directory containing programs to generate marking files, testing, and reports.
• cat/doc is a directory containing programs and data file for CATool documentation and help.

6. Course file system

Course file system is specified to work with CATool.

1. Course root directory (course_root), the directory contains all course specifications and materials of a course

   • course_root/cat.json, a JSON file gives course specific CATool parameters and values for CATool operations, to be used by cat/configure.json
   • course_root/syllabus, a directory contains high level course specification json files, including course_info.json, lesson_toc.json, examples.json, references.json
   • course_root/lessons, a directory contains sub-directories of raw content files of lessons of each lesson.
   • course_root/work, a directory contains sub-directory of assignments, labs, project(s), and submissions. The sub-directories and contains, sub-directories of each individual job (assignment, lab, or project). The job directory contains the job specification files.
   • course_root/release, a directory contains all documents files for the delivery. The delivery is a zip of the release directory. Most files in the release directory is generated by the CATool tools using the provided configuration files.

2. Course information specifications

   • instructor_info.json gives instructor’s contact information, can be in a common directory, specified in cat.json
   • regulations.json gives the grouped regulations, can be in a common directory, specified in cat.json
   • course_root/syllabus/course_info.json gives information for course syllabus, lectures, assignments, labs, projects, lessons, lectures, etc.
   • course_root/syllabus/lesson_toc.json gives structured information of lessons, such as lesson titles, section titles, and sub-section titles.

3. Course teaching contents

   • L??.md, L??_head.md, L??_tail.md provides details of lesson sections, quizzes and excises of each section, in LL?? directory
   • course_root/syllabus/examples.json gives structured information of examples.
   • course_root/syllabus/references.json gives structured information of references.

4. Course work specification. Course work consists of jobs. Three types of jobs are covered by CATool: assignment, lab, and project.

   • course_root/work/assignments/a?/a?.json, question.md give assignment specifications.
   • course_root/work/labs/lab??.json, task.md give lab task specifications.
   • course_root/work/project/project.json, project.md give project requirement specifications.

5. Course work evaluation (marking and grading of course work submissions). course_root/work/submissions directory contains job submission directories of each jobs. Each job directory contains

   • course_root/work/submissions/download directory stores the submission zip files of job submissions.
   • course_root/work/submissions/marking directory is a working directory to test and evaluate a submission
   • course_root/work/submissions/report directory is a directory to store marking reports of submissions
   • course_root/work/submissions/template directory is a directory to store marking reference data files.

7. CATtool packaging and installation

CATool package file, catool.zip, contains all necessary software systems to run the CATool programs, containing directories: cat, pandoc, and php. Follow the following installation steps to install and configure CATool.

1. Unzip the package to a folder, say C:/catool, then CATool root directory will be C:/catool/cat
2. Create (user) system environment variable CAT with value C:/catool/cat
3. Add path C:/catool/cat/bin to (user) environment path
4. If pandoc is not installed, add path C:/catool/pandoc to (user) environment path; otherwise delete the catool/pandoc directory.
5. If PHP is not installed, add path C:/catool/php to (user) environment path; otherwise delete the catool/php directory.

Open a command line console, type the following commands to test the installation. The output of the commands should display the proper information of the programs.

• catool -v
• pandoc -v
• php -v

8. CATool operations

CATool operations include configuration template generations, course file system generations, syllabus generations, lesson generations, course work (assignment, labs, projects) generations, and marking generations.

Configuration template operations

Course design starts from configuring the course system json files. The basic json files include cat.json for CATool tool configuration, course_info.json and lesson_toc.json for lesson information, etc. The command generate_templates is to generate the templates of the basic JSON files. First create a course root folder. Open a command line console and cd to the root folder. Issue the command generate_templates help to get the command help as follows.

Run command generate_templates all 2 to generate cat.json, the syllabus folder and course_info.json, lesson_toc.json, instructor_info.json, examples.json, references.json.

Set course specific values in this JSON files.

Help information about command generate_templates

This command is to generate course specification json templates

Syntax: generate_templates [operation_type] [output_type]

Allowed operation_type values:
help or help is to display help information of this command
0 or cat is to generate course specific cat.json template for CAT
1 or course_info is to generate course_info.json template
2 or lesson_toc is to generate lesson_toc.json template
3 or instructor_info is to generate instructor_info.json template
4 or examples is to generate examples.json template
5 or references is to generate references.json template
6 or regulations is to generate regulations.json template
7 or all is to generate all basic json templates

Allowed output_type values:
0 or debug is to display debug messages
1 or stdout is to display the contents on screen
2 or file is to save to files
3 or both is to display and save to files 

Course file system generations

After the setting of course specific values in the JSON files, we can create the source file system by command generate_cfs. The generate_cfs help provides the help information of the command as follows. generate_cfs all 2 generates all the directories and copies necessary files to target directories.

Help information about command generate_cfs

This command is to generate course file system. It is required the course_info.json.

Syntax: generate_fs [operation_type] [output_type]

Allowed operation_type values:
help or help is to display help information of this command
0 or lesson is to generate lesson directories
1 or work is to generate work directories
2 or release is to generate release directories
3 or file is to copy template files to the release folders
4 or all is do all above

Allowed output_type values:
0 or debug is to display debug messages
1 or stdout is to display the contents on screen
2 or file is to save to files
3 or both is to display and save to files 

Syllabus web page generations

Command generate_syllabus generates all front end web HTML pages of a regular course.

Help information about command generate_syllabus

This command is to to generate syllabus page html documents

Syntax: generate_syllabus [operation_type] [output_type]

Allowed operation_type values:
help or help is to display help information of this command
0 or index is to generate index_static.html
1 or syllabus is to generate syllabus_static.html
2 or schedule is to generate schedule_static.html
3 or lesson is to generate lesson_static.html
4 or assignment is to generate assignment_static.html
5 or lab is to generate lab_static.html
6 or example is to generate example_static.html
7 or reference is to generate reference_static.html
8 or all is to generate all the above html documents

Allowed output_type values:
0 or debug is to display debug messages
1 or stdout is to display the contents on screen
2 or file is to save to files
3 or both is to display and save to files 

TOC generations

Command generate_tocs generates all front end web HTML pages of an online course.

Help information about command generate_tocs

This command is to to generate documents of table of contents (online-course).

Syntax: generate_tocs [operation_type] [output_type]

Allowed operation_type values:
help or help is to display help information of this command
0 or index is to generate index.md and index_build.bat
1 or welcome is to generate welcome.md and welcome_build.bat
2 or roadmap is to generate roadmap.md and roadmap_build.bat
3 or syllabus is to generate syllabus.md and syllabus_build.bat
4 or schedule is to generate schedule.md and schedule_build.bat
5 or example is to generate example.md and example_build.bat
6 or reference is to generate reference.md and reference_build.bat
7 or release is toc_build.bat, toc_release.bat, release_all.bat, clean_release_all.bat
8 or all is to generate all toc files

Allowed output_type values:
help or help is to display help information of this command
0 or debug is to display debug messages
1 or stdout is to display the contents on screen
2 or file is to save to files
3 or both is to display and save to files 
4 or release is to save file to batch file and call to run

Lesson generations

Generate HTML documents of weekly lessons for online courses or regular course when provided.

Help information about command generate_lessons

This command is to to generate html documents for lesson start to lesson end

Syntax: generate_lessons [operation_type] [output_type] [start] [end]

Allowed operation_type values:
help or help is to display help information of this command
0 or lesson is to generate L..intro.md, ..head.md, ..body.md, tail.md, L..build.bat for each lesson from start to end
1 or lessons is to generate build_lessons.bat to all L..build.bat from the start to end
2 or release is to generate release_lessons.bat for releasing all lesson html documents to lesson release directory of start to end
3 or all is to generate all above files

Allowed output_type values:
0 or debug is to display debug messages
1 or stdout is to display the contents on screen
2 or file is to save to files
3 or both is to display and save to files 

Allowed start values:
1 or specific lesson id is to set the starting lesson index

Allowed end values:
1 or specific lesson id is to set the ending lesson index

Work generations

Generate assignments, labs and projects

Help information about command generate_jobs

This command is to to generate documents of jobs.

Syntax: generate_jobs [job_type] [operation_type] [output_type] [start_id] [end_id]

Allowed job_type values:
help or help is to display help information of this command
0 or assignment is to work on assignment
1 or lab is to work on lab
2 or project is to work on project

Allowed operation_type values:
0 or readme is to generate readme.txt
1 or report is to generate jobname_report.md
2 or head is to generate jobname_head.md
3 or body is to generate jobname_body_template.md
4 or tail is to generate jobname_tail.md
5 or build is to generate jobname_build.bat
6 or job is to generate all files of of the job
7 or jobs is to generate [type]_build.bat for all jobs of the type from start to end
8 or work is to generate work_build.bat for all types of jobs from starts to ends specified in cat.json

Allowed output_type values:
0 or debug is to display debug messages
1 or stdout is to display the contents on screen
2 or file is to save to files
3 or both is to display and save to files 

Allowed start_id values:
1 or specific job id is to set the starting job index

Allowed end_id values:
1 or specific job id is to set the ending job index

Mark generations

Generate files for marking course work submissions.

Help information about command generate_marks

This command is to to generate marking files.

Syntax: generate_marks [job_type] [job_id] [operation_type] [output_type]

Allowed job_type values:
help or help is to display help information of this command
0 or assignment is to set the job type to mark
1 or lab is to work on lab
2 or project is to work on project

Allowed job_id values:
1 or specific job id is to set the job id to mark

Allowed operation_type values:
0 or marklist is to generate template/marklist.txt
1 or gradegrid is to generate template/gradegrid.txt
2 or solutiontest is to generate testing results of solutions. template/a?.md
3 or solutiongrid is to generate a?ans.mk from a?.md
4 or testmap is to generate testmap.mk
5 or single is to mark single submission in the marking folder, generate report in report folder
6 or group is to mark all submissions in the download folder, generate report in report folder
7 or combine is to combine individual reports to MyLS loadfile.txt, which can be submitted to given job folder  through https://bohr.wlu.ca/ezmarker/
8 or all is to generate gradegrid, solutiontest, solutiongrid, testmap

Allowed output_type values:
0 or debug is to display debug messages
1 or stdout is to display the contents on screen
2 or file is to save to files
3 or both is to display and save to files