Re: Collaborating with non-pandoc peers

[Kolen Cheung <christian.kolen-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>]

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Workshop is not the same as a course. If something cannot earn them credits, most/some of them will not spend time to learn it (as I said, they are already very busy with parttime jobs). (I am planning to offer a ~1 hour workshop on using pandoc too, but  the venue is at the library, and has a capacity of about half a hundred seats. The total no of students in our university is about half 10k or more.

And it is bravo for you to require the students in your class (for credit) to learn markdown. It will gives a lot of incentives to learn it. But I would say you and your students are the minority:

1. for many students when they first take a class, they will observe how much workload they would expect (and also how lenient you are to give good grades) from it and decided if they should stay. In the case if you just ask them to learn markdown, it's not really that much workload. It's fine. But I don't think it will stand much chance if we start to introduce terminal/command line, flags, compiling, setting up text editors, raw LaTeX/HTML, etc. (assuming your class is not an advanced class. For advanced classes, one would expect the students to be willing to "do everything"...)

2. last bullet is not critical but this one is: how many instructors are like you? From my experience, I never have seen a lecturer to use markdown/pandoc. If they use LaTeX, they just assume we know it and no workshop. If they use MS Office, we just assume we know it (while not trained in it).

I knew these because I am a graduate student, so I have taken a lot of courses in different disciplines, and in 2 different instuitions with very different culture (hardly a huge stat), and at the same time teaches courses at various level of difficulties (from 1st undergrad to 1st year grad). So this are not make up, albeit not from a large sampling. But if this is true to the university where the author/creator of pandoc is in, at least it reflects part of the truth.

Just to make it clear, none if these are problems of the pandoc cli tool. It's just that the education system as well as the current trend of consumers do not favor this kind of workflow. And then I'm kind of in the "if I can't beat them, join them" spirit to brainstorm what else could happen to help them. 

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