COVID Tracking Project Archive Course in a Box

The COVID data journalism course-in-a-box – available online here – is an open-source curriculum for teaching the conceptual foundations of data journalism using material from the COVID Tracking Project Archive, housed at the University of California, San Francisco.

Although the content of this course is targeted primarily toward data journalism educators on the undergraduate level, all the materials on the site are open for use to anyone interested in learning or teaching data journalism.

The project was designed and created by Tyler Dukes for the COVID Tracking Project Archive housed at the University of California, San Francisco Archives and Special Collections. Funded was provided by a data engagement award from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine Region 5 and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (Sloan grant G-2022-17133).

The site uses the Course-in-a-Box tool from Peer 2 Peer University for building and publishing online courses.

Making changes

For detailed documentation on how to use the course-in-a-box tool from P2PU, follow the organization's setup and customization guide.

To make changes to the template itself, a good place to start is the _layouts, _includes and css directories. These directories contain all the layout and style files used.

See this Boostrap 4 cheatsheet for a quick reference to classes that mostly work with the underlying Boostrap 4 template in use here.

For custom style used with the CTP Archive project, use the css/p2pustrap-custom.scss file.

Push to the gh-pages fork.

Adding materials

Custom-created course materials are stored in the materials directory. Other source materials are linked directly to the COVID Tracking Project or the COVID Tracking Project archive where possible.

When linking images, make sure to use {{ site.baseurl }} to work with both testing and the deployed version.

Style notes

Notes to keep styling consistent.

Credit style for tips and further reading

* [Linked title](http://google.com)
: Author, *Publication*

Instructor note boxes

<div class="alert alert-primary" role="alert">
    <strong>FOR INSTRUCTORS:</strong> This message for instructors offers pedagogical guidance and tips on presenting the lesson.
</div>

Pro tip boxes

<div class="alert alert-info" role="alert">
    <strong>PRO TIP:</strong> This message for students offers reminders or best practices during walkthroughs and other aspects of the course. Sometimes it might <a href="#!" class="alert-link">include a link</a>.
</div>

Reminder boxes

<div class="alert alert-success" role="alert">
    <strong>REMINDER:</strong> Specific instructions involving troubleshooting or avoiding errors and pitfalls.
</div>

Running locally

Local testing done via Jekyll, which can be installed with the instructions here.

Run in the directory

bundle exec jekyll serve

ctp-archive/data-journalism