1. Introduction

Lecturer in the university (especially in computing, science, mathematics) often use only PowerPoint presentation format as a lecture note to delivery message to the students. The same printable PowerPoint slides are often provided to the students in a PDF format. This causes several problems:

• In most cases, all interactive material (such as video, animation, things that the lecturer has said) are removed or disabled in this format (pdf).
• Printed powerpoint may not be the best way to represent information.
  • It wasted space and may not have an effective organisation of information.

1. Goal:

To provide a flexible and extensible document viewing and editing platform that can be used in class (during lecture) and out of class (revision) to allow lecturers to provide a more effective and comfortable learning experience to students, so that students can learn more effectively.

2. Detail:

2.1 Flexible document format

A document format that can be transformed for different context such as presentation, reading and printing.

2.1.1 Benefit

Lectures do not need to maintain separate files for lecture and for student’s printing.

2.1.2 Different modes

2.1.2.1 Presentation mode (Slides)

A summarised or concise version of the text can be used to during presentation to help the lecturer to guide the students

2.1.2.2 Reading mode (HTML)

A more detailed information can be fitted here in this document. These information may not be shown in the presentation mode during lecture and should be read by the students after class. Students can view the document in reading mode with their PC or mobile. Additional feature can be added to aid the students, such as table of content, bookmark, etc..

2.1.2.3 Printing mode (Pages)

A nicely formatted document (e.g. better page break) can be automatically provided to the student with no / minimal effort from the author.

2.2 Extensible

The document format can be extended with add-on / plugin. Different kind of lecture could utilise different plugin to convey knowledge. Example of plugins:

• Latex / Mathematics supports
• Codes Syntax highlighting
• Online compiler
• Illustration / 3D model viewer
• Physics simulation
• Multimedia content, video, sound
• Discussion / comment space
• Photo gallery

* Most/all of the thing listed above already have 3rd party library support or can be created.

3. Target audiences

This project is primarily target for lecturers and students in university.

It is possible to expand this idea to wider audience outside of university. Such as in the context of workplace where users need to write documentation, proposal or presentation.

4. Feasibility

👍 Hackmd.io is a document editing software that allow hybrid presentation between document format and slide. See https://hackmd.io/slide-example

👍 Pointer Event provides stylus support for Windows 10 machine. Lecturer can now use stylus on a Web Browser. Support for Pointer Event across all modern browser is imminent (in less than a few months).

👍 Many feature described above can be achieved with many popular library / external services such as MathJax, ThreeJs, JsFiddle, ...

5. Existing product

1. Hackmd.io
2. Project Jupyter: The Jupyter Notebook is a web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and explanatory text.