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Comment by jovas | Hacker News Reader

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jovas·

Can sweave be integrated with a learning management system?

Ximera allows authors to write online interactive texts, that can serve as the HW system for a class.

The student's work can be directly sent to the grade book via LTI.

Moreover, you can simultaneously produce a PDF that looks like a traditional text.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/the-ohio-state-university-math-depa...

Which nobody needs to buy, since the PDF generating the text is freely available.

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There are some R packages that allow for development of e-learning materials, these are Rmarkdown based so similar to knitr rather than sweave, but basically the same idea. The downside is the lack of symbolic support in R. Ximera does look interesting however. A second question I would have is how this would compare with Jupyter interactive notebooks which have LaTeX support and automated grading as well as symbolic algebra capabilities? Nevertheless additional tools are always welcome.

I don't think Jupyter offers a facility like $\frac{\answer{2}}{4} = 1/2$ for putting answer blanks in the middle of mathematical expressions. For sagemath, code like \sage{derivative(f,x)} also works, even inside an \answer.

An activity in Ximera has state, and this state is synchronized (via Fraser's differential synchronization) with all open clients, so the instructor can watch a student while they work in Ximera, and even edit the page alongside them.

If I understand your comment, correctly, then grading facility in Jupyter allows something like that I believe. My question related more to any symbolic/computer algebra capabilities Ximera may have, or does it just allow for interactive documents without computational tools?

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