Project name

Design and build an attractive website to promote CERN's Academic Training & modernise publishing workflow

Project description

The CERN Academic Training lectures contain brilliant material of leading-edge technology as well as great historical value. The lectures are open to all members of CERN personnel (in particular staff members and fellows, associates, students, users, project associates and apprentices) free of charge.

Each lecture is recorded and published on the web along with the visual support material. The complete catalogue of Academic Training and Summer Student Programme lectures are archived since 1999.

Similar CERN lectures are available via other CERN lecture categories, e.g. Colloquia, Seminars, various students' programmes.

The project is about designing and building an attractive website to promote CERN's Academic Training, seminars, colloquia and summer student lectures in a coherent way, and easily maintained in future.

Information should be exchanged with IR/ECO to avoid effort duplication and encourage the site exploration by various target groups. Steps:

1. List and evaluate what other research and academic institutes do to promote their educational material. An inventory was done in 2016 here that needs to be enhanced. Check the Royal Institute site, EPFL, MIT and others to select best features. Check the twiki link in the References for input.
2. Make a mockup of a web site to propose to the Academic Training Committee (ATC). Propose various scenarii - e.g. inclusion (or not) of other CERN lecture categories (by early October).
3. Make a proposal on the technology to use (it must be an Open Source solution).  For example: Explain why Drupal instead of Wordpress or React. (mid-October). Make sure it works also on mobile devices.
4. Build the web site https://cern.ch/academictraining with tailor-made views. For example: The lectures in Indico and their videos in the CERN Document Server on "the Higgs boson", "Dark matter", "Machine Learning", "Statistics" etc.
5. Evaluate and discuss with the Academic Training Committee the possibility to email periodic notifications on the programme activities.
6. Make a proposal on whether, where and how to manage "Comments". Use the experience obtained from the CERN-Solid collaboration for this. See here the relevant project.
7. Foresee a button for submission of ideas for future lectures.
8. Make a proposal for  support on user queries related to the web site.
9. Foresee an Administrator's documentation for the site maintainer, written in Markdown as per this guide.

Note: The following points were included in the original project proposal. They will be addressed via other projects with other funds.

1. Using the same Markdown-based documentation policy make a technical recommendations' document for the end-users https://makeyourownsite.docs.cern.ch, with instructions, based on the technologies available from IT/CDA-WF.
2. Simplify the IT/CDA-IC and IT/CDA-DR workflow at lecture video publishing time, in collaboration with the weblecture-service and CDS and videos.cern.ch experts.
3. Help with  the migration of the Academic Training  videos' collection from CDS to videos.cern.ch.
4. Help with the bulk update of this videos' backlog with subtitles, based on the output of the related effort to select a tool for this purpose.

 

Output produced
 

1. The site produced is https://academictraining.cern.ch/
2. Thesis final in CDS https://cds.cern.ch/record/2871419/
3. Event https://indico.cern.ch/event/1136720/ contains ALL the reports. some of which are the following (not all for public access)
4. Working log with all links
5. Initial mockups of the views in CERNBox (if this record no more exists, after the student's login expiration, all the mockups are in the thesis reports (attached to 1) as Appendices.
6. JIRA project (IT CDA group access and developers)
7. Software repo https://github.com/cern-sis/cern-academic-training/
8. Internship report at the end of six months of stay at CERN
9. Several progress reports during the thesis checkpoint meetings with University supervisor all attached to the Indico event of point 1 above.
   1. For example Terra Incognita presentation https://indico.cern.ch/event/1080998/
   2. Four presentations to the Academic Training Committee (ATC), can't linked from here, as the Indico category is restricted to the ATC.

Required skills

Python programming, javascript, other scripting tools, mockup drawing with idraw, gimp or other tool, good communication skills, web development expertise (Drupal, React), web usability rules' experience, Openshift, gitlab and github use.

Learning experience

The material and the collaborating team (the ATC and the CERN IT Web Frameworks experts) are source of valuable experience, information and advice. The student will learn a lot in terms of visualisation of information on the Web.

Project duration

one year

Project area

Learning

Contact for further details

Maria Dimou

References

1. Past inventory https://twiki.cern.ch/Edutech/ArtAndScienceCoolVideos
2. Markdown documentation guide https://how-to.docs.cern.ch
3. The CERN-Solid code investigation project https://it-student-projects.web.cern.ch/projects/cern-solid-code-investigation
4. Academic Training videos in CDS https://cds.cern.ch/collection/Academic Training Lectures
5. Modern videos collection https://videos.cern.ch
6. Notes on Subtitles https://codimd.web.cern.ch/rAX3vM6XTi657uCYsMyZXQ

CERN group

IT-CDA

Status

Accomplished Submitted by Maria Dimou on Monday, October 5, 2020 - 14:06.