Reorganizing My Teaching Files | Christopher B. Goodman

I have a problem.

I teach, more or less, the same course in both fall and spring semesters. And, it has been this way for most of my career. That means I have accumulated 14 years (gasp) of cruft in my teaching files. I did the thing that I now counsel every junior faculty member not to do: I didn’t put any thought into how I might use these files well into the future.

So, as a result, I ended up with a giant mess (of my own making). It’s time to fix this problem.

I have landed on this file structure. It is fairly tidy and allows me to get to the things I use most often, typically course syllabi and individual lectures. Previously, stuff was all over—of particular issue was multiple versions of the same lecture living in the /lectures folder.

.
├── archive
├── assignments/
│   ├── memos
│   ├── revenue-analysis
│   └── presentation
├── classes/
│   ├── 25f
│   └── 26spr
├── lectures/
│   ├── 01-individual-lecture/
│   │   ├── content/
│   │   │   ├── data
│   │   │   ├── html
│   │   │   └── img
│   │   ├── out
│   │   ├── resources
│   │   └── run.sh
│   ├── archive
│   ├── data
│   ├── guest-lectures
│   └── resources/
│       ├── img
│       ├── img-background
│       ├── img-thumbnail
│       └── pdf
├── mailings
├── readings
├── rubrics
└── webiste

First thing you’ll notice is archive is everywhere. That serves two purposes. First, sometimes you just need to clean house. Second, I don’t want to lose old work, so putting it somewhere that I can go looking for it is helpful. But onto the good stuff. Most of this is relatively standard. Assignments go in the assignment folder, everything to do with a specific class offering is in the classes folder ( won’t list all of them here. It’s 19(!) from only my time at NIU.), etc.

Where most of my issues are is around lectures and all the associated data, images, and resources for them. I have chosen to organize a particular lecture. The code to create the lecture lives here (/content), along with all the associated information (primarily data and images). This is also where the output of this process lives, either an HTML file or a PDF (/out). All of this is controlled by run.sh that renders the Quarto file in /content and moves the output to /out. The /resources folder includes any recordings that I might do, audio or visual. The lectures folder also contains centralized resources. Whether that’s guest lecture files, centralized data (I keep central data files that I output to smaller pieces for individual lectures), or centralized resources such as downloaded images, backgrounds for title pages, or thumbnails for videos.

Organizing around a lecture is a conscience choice. This is how I organize my course, so it makes sense. Everything revolves around a particular week. Your course may not, so a different organizing principle might make more sense. However, I urge you to be thoughtful about how you do this. You never know when you’ll look back, it has been a decade (whether constantly teaching or between course offerings), and you’re full of regret.