PROJECT: Custom Course Builder — bespoke lecture packs (book + syllabus)

[mmcky]

Summary

Productise a Custom Course Builder — tooling and a public offering that lets an instructor assemble a tailored "mini book" (PDF + mini-website) from QuantEcon lecture content for their own course.

Supersedes #99, which captured the original plugin idea but has sat dormant. This issue widens scope from a tooling plugin to a complete offering (tech + product + delivery formats).

Background

@thomassargent30 has, for a while, been "delivering" lectures in two custom forms that Matt has built ad-hoc:

1. One-course "books" — a curated subset of QuantEcon lectures, built as a mini Jupyter Book and put online for a specific course. This has worked well in practice.
2. Syllabus-as-delivery — a syllabus document that points to specific lecture pages as the reading list (Tom is experimenting with one for a possible Wharton class).

Tom's proposal: go public with this capability — advertise it on quantecon.org, show a couple of examples, and offer to produce a bespoke book for an instructor's course for a small fee (he suggested $35–$50 per book) as a small revenue stream.

lecture-dp is effectively the first publicly produced example of this pattern at the series level — once it's live, it becomes the template and proof-of-concept.

Scope

A. Tooling (inherits from #99)

• Interface for building a custom _toc.yml from any of the upstream lecture repos
• Cached executable output across upstream repos so that custom books can be generated quickly (no full re-execution)
• Cross-lecture dependency tracking — when an instructor picks lecture X, suggest its prerequisites
• Web interface for selection + delivery
• Output formats: PDF + mini website (Jupyter Book / MyST)

B. Product / offering

• Public landing page on quantecon.org describing the offering
• Example gallery (start with lecture-dp once live, plus 1–2 of Tom's existing bespoke books if shareable)
• Pricing model — Tom's suggestion: $35–$50/book. Decide between flat fee, tiered (length / number of lectures), or pay-what-you-want
• Order / intake form — what does the instructor specify? (course title, lecture list, branding, delivery format, hosting preference)
• Delivery: hosted under quantecon.org/courses/<instructor>/<course>? Per-instructor subdomain? PDF only? Decide.
• Payment processing (Stripe? GitHub Sponsors? Invoice?)
• Licensing/attribution boilerplate that goes into every bespoke book
• Time/cost estimate per book — what level of customisation is in-scope vs out-of-scope at the base price

C. Syllabus variant

• Standardise a syllabus template that links into QuantEcon lecture pages as the reading list
• Offer this as a lighter-weight (free?) companion to the paid bespoke-book product
• Tom's Wharton syllabus is a useful first artefact to learn from

Why now

• The lecture-dp series will soon give us the first end-to-end example of a course-shaped publication built from QuantEcon content — the tooling needed to support it is largely the same tooling needed for course-builder.
• The course-shaped-series strategy (#258) and the retirement of the topic-based sites mean we are already investing in the production tech that course-builder rides on top of.
• An incremental revenue stream is attractive and low-effort once the infrastructure is in place.

Related

• #99 — closed as incomplete; original plugin idea now subsumed here
• #258 — Create new DP lecture series (course-shaped series strategy)
• #173 — Lecture Improvement Project (upstream content quality feeds custom courses)
• #301 — Publish DP books as website (shares the "discoverability of curated QE content" goal)

Suggested next steps

1. Pick an example bespoke book of Tom's to publish as the first public case study
2. Decide on hosting/URL convention and pricing
3. Stub a landing page on quantecon.org with a "request a custom course book" form (manual fulfilment first; productise after a few real orders)

cc @thomassargent30 @jstac @HumphreyYang