I’m curious as to whether other groups use javascript in their courses, especially scripts/libraries/whatever that they deploy across multiple courses. I’m thinking less about one-off widgets and interactive and more about general functionality improvements.
I work at HarvardX and we have our own library, HX-JS, that we use across many courses. It does hide-show buttons, pretty headers and boxes, code syntax highlighting, image sliders, pop-up boxes for clickable images, and a bunch of other minor but common items. It’s MIT-licensed, so if you want to use it or adapt it please feel free.
Yes, I’ve used some very basic JavaScript and jquery inline in courses a while ago in my old job. It was a bit of a sloppy job though. I ended up taking what I’d done and putting them into some very simple XBlocks because my technical skills are limited and I was sick of maintaining it within courses. Nothing nearly as good as the HX-JS stuff but still.
I’d love to see more of these sorts of improvements making it into the core tools in Studio though. The more robust tools we can give authors the better in my opinion. Studio’s really starting to lag in terms of authoring functionality
I hear you there. There are some things in HX-JS (like pop-up problems) that have been perennial feature requests for edX. Some folks at edX even made some improvements on them at a hackathon with the goal of folding them into Studio, but it never happened.