Obsidian for course management

[Kullenej]

We talk a lot about Obsidian for academics often in the context of citations and sources, but I wanted to hear whether anyone use Obsidian for course management.

Inspired by some discussions on the forum I’m thinking about seperating my vault into two - one for Zettelkasten (sources and ideas) and one for my work planning. I work as a teacher at the university and teach several different courses that I would like to track (meeting notes, lesson plans etc). But i need inspiration about whether to use tags, links or folders for courses in my vault. I guess tags and links would make it easier to quickly make a connection.

Anyone using Obsidian for course management who want to share their workflow?

[Kevzen]

I personally don’t have an answer, but I would recommend to check out @DanAllosso’s YouTube channel. He has a couple of videos about his Obsidian class vault

Obsidian Class Vault

[Kullenej]

Thanks but not quite what I meant. He is using it for class management (shared with the students) whereas I’m talking about my own planning of courses and meeting notes, reading lists, syllabus, students information etc.

I guess one way of thinking it is thinking about each of my courses as projects but I’m not so up to date on how people are using it for projects, preferably projects like course management.

But thanks Kevzen for the link!

[kamran.soomro]

I want to do the same as you; use Obsidian for lesson planning. I was wondering if you made any progress with this? Do you have any lesson plan templates you’d like to share?

[Kullenej]

Hello! I have actually been thinking about re-igniting this thread again gathering all teachers that use Obsidian to see what they do (and how!).

I’m still tweaking and tweaking my workflow and am still not satisfied. Actually, just today I started looking into using Logseq as the overall Vault, and using Obsidian for curated and finished material. But this is still in a beginning idea-phase.

Here is how I been using Obsidian (also Devonthink and Zotero) this term.

Here is a screenshot of my folders:

Devonthink indexes my vault. I have a folder in my vault called 20 Teaching with sub-folders for the 8 courses I teach and then a folder for meetings/administration related to everything, a folder for general teaching material.

The subfolders for each course then contain a “template” for the course structure and a subfolder for the term (HT21 - meaning FallTerm2021). This contains a index-page for the term and then a page for each lesson.

These folders is then accessible in DevonThink for search and for adding presentations etc. When I teach, I tend to use the lesson page as a whiteboard for the students by opening it in Typora (clean and non-disturbing theme with WYSIWYG).

There is more to this workflow but it is still not quite concrete for me yet. I would love some feedback and ideas! For example, how could we incorporate daily notes?

[atiz]

I also use Obsidian for my course notes (most of them I migrated from other places).
It seems to be an unpopular strategy, but I have a separate folder titled “teaching”, in which there are further subfolders for each course topic I taught, where I keep these notes.
When I have to come up with a semester plan/schedule, I link to these course notes and modify them as needed for the current semester.
In short, I keep the notes for each subject separate, but not for each semester. E.g., all my notes related to “Metaphysics” class, no matter how I taught it, are in one place, and when I have to teach it again, then I “pick and choose” from that folder.

I also have a “general resources” folder under teaching where I keep things that are not related to the content of any specific course – interesting links, articles, etc. that I want to keep for later.

[lsieverts]

I use Curio to make a big picture visual map of my course (work in progress so not everything makes sense yet!).

In Obsidian, I have a MOC for this year’s class, which is linked to notes that are copied year to year, such as my syllabus (I use Marked to generate HTML to paste into Canvas), and also linked to notes with ideas about what I could do this year.

[bewildergeist]

@lsieverts You might be able to skip the Marked workflow. If you display your notes in Reading view in Obsidian, you can copy-paste the text directly into the WYSIWYG editor in Canvas as decent HTML.