Generating the course document


The sample course is adaptive in a simple way. There are two versions: an "expert" version that includes Latin names, and a "beginner" version that doesn't. The expert content pages have values of 0.8 for their detail and level properties; the beginner pages have values of 0.4.

The course document is generated by processing the knowledge base with an XSLT template, course_gen.xsl. The top-level template matches the <tree-info> tag of the knowledge base. The template outputs a number of <tp:content> tags for the manually generated content items. Then it uses another template for each tree species in the knowledge base.

For each species, the template generates tags for two lessons: one beginner, one expert. The expert lesson has an accompanying exercise involving the species' Latin name. Then the template generates tags for several graphical multiple-choice exercises for each species. Finally, after handling all species, it generates a number of multiple-choice "identify this tree" exercise tags.

For each lesson and exercise, the tags include a command attribute giving the command line used to generate the corresponding core document. The execution of these commands is performed by a program generate_content_files, which scans through a course file and executes all the commands, naming the results according to the item's filename attribute.

Next-> Generating lessons

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