A tool that runs automated heuristic evaluations for online documentation and course material.
The heuristics are based on a number of sources on education and technical writing:
- SUNY Online Course Quality Review Rubrics
- Literature on Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, such as:
- Pokorny, H. and Warren, D. Enhancing Teaching Practice in Higher Education. Sage, 2016. First edition. (TODO: 2nd edition is out)
- Barkley, E.F. and Howell Major, C. Engaged Teaching: A Handbook for College Faculty. SocialGood/K. Patricia Cross Academy, 2022.
While developing this tool, it is a good idea to keep in view competitors with similar functionality.
There are plenty of website style checkers but they tend to focus on certain aspects such as responsiveness, accessibility, markup validity, or
Notable ones are:
- The Nu Html Checker is the W3C's tool for checking correct usage of HTML markup. Definitely worth running as part of a larger suite of tests. There is a Python wrapper for it, though it does not seem to be acively maintained?
-
mkdocs-spellcheck: an MkDocs plugin that runs a spell-checker over the rendered HTML.
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linkchecker-mkdocs: an MkDocs plugin that checks for broken links.
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mktestdocs an MkDocs plugin that runs code examples through
pytest.
These tend to be written in other languages (Ruby, JS, Java) or have other features that make them less than ideal for the use cases I have in mind. Many of them are from https://earthly.dev/blog/markdown-lint/
-
markdownlint: