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Oliver Pham
Oliver Pham

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How I Contributed to an OER Project

I finally had a chance to work on IPC144, an Open Educational Resources (OER) project with a view to modernizing the old IPC144 course website with Docusaurus. As a first time contributor, I found a perfect issue to get familiar with the project: auditing and fixing the automatically translated Markdown files.

Getting started

As instructed in the meta issue, I opened a new issue for the page on which I'd like to work. Once I'd cloned the repository, I could immediately start auditing the Markdown file without any additional configuration. I had to go over a long checklist posted in the meta issue, but I'll discuss what I've found interesting in this blog.

Docusaurus Features

Docusaurus has 2 distinct features that can significantly improve the old IPC144 website:

  • Frontmatter: the top section of a content file used for specifying metadata and Docusaurus's configuration variables
  • Admonition: a highlighted section in a content file

Frontmatter

Frontmatter example

Docusaurus supports a large number of Frontmatter fields. I added 4 of them to the Markdown file for SEO optimization:

---
id: algorithms
...
title: "Algorithms"
slug: /refinements/algorithms
description: "An algorithm is the set of rules that define the sequence of operations required to complete the task."
---
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Admonition

There were some noteworthy sections of the page. However, they barely stood out because of the use of Markdown blockquote like this:

Blockquote

Luckily, Docusaurus' Admonition is perfect for this role. It is really eye-catching and easy to use. For example, I can enclose the content with :::note and ::::

:::note

The value returned by `find()` (variable `i`) is validated to ensure that it is within the bounds of the key array (that is, we check that it is not -1 and not more than the number of items in the array). 

:::
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and it will be rendered like this:

Admonition Example

Final thoughts

Although it might seem like a small issue, it's still very satisfying to know that my contribution can enhance the learning experience of other fellow students.


Issue: https://github.com/Seneca-ICTOER/IPC144/issues/28
PR: https://github.com/Seneca-ICTOER/IPC144/pull/72
Docusaurus: https://docusaurus.io/docs

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