LiaScript: a domain-specific-language for interactive online courses

This is the first paper published about LiaScript, which was presented at the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS) International Conference on e-Learning 2019 in Porto. It gives an overview of the language and its features, as well as the motivation behind its development.

Abstract. LiaScript is an attempt to enable everyone to create free and interactive online courses, without the need of being an experienced programmer. Instead, it aims to bring both parties, software-and course-developers, closer together by introducing Open-Source techniques into the Open-courSe development process. LiaScript was designed to be compatible to Common-Markdown, but it introduces lots of language extensions that deal with quizzes, surveys, ASCII-art, text2speech, animations, online programming, the integration of JavaScript, etc. as well as its own macro-system that simplifies tedious and repetitive tasks. It comes along with its own just-in-time compiler that runs in the browser and therefor does not require additional tooling.

download / liascript / github

@InProceedings{dietrich2019,
  author    = {Andr\'e Dietrich},
  title     = {LiaScript: a domain-specific-language for interactive online courses},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on e-Learning 2019},
  year      = {2019},
  pages     = {186--194},
  address   = {Porto, Portugal}
}

The video recording below was made at the 7th of April in 2024. I am looking back at the conference with a smile, remembering that the best presentation award was a publication that made calculations and estimates about the real prices of developing online courses and MOOCs with traditional tools and systems… The same document that I wrote 5 years ago, is still there, it can be still used. The document did not change, while we constantly improve the interpreter.

Click on the link below to try out this interactive paper in LiaScript by your own: