Paul Hibbitts, originally from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, is an interaction designer and educator with over two decades of combined industry and higher-ed teaching experience. He founded one of **Vancouver’s first consultancies** dedicated to providing human-centered design services and played a pivotal role in evolving the trailblazing user interface design course CMPT-363 at Simon Fraser University.
Since 2022, Paul has focused his efforts on open-source software for open publishers, educators, and creators. His recent interests include systems thinking and the evolution of conceptual model design through OOUX (Object-Oriented User Experience).
Paul is the creator of Docsify-This.net, a lightweight Markdown open publishing tool and a finalist in the 2024 Open Education Awards for Excellence.
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As someone who benefited from informational interviews early in my career, I am open to coffee meetups in Vancouver (#YVR) to share insights on higher education instruction, interaction design, or professional consulting.
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Always learning, always designing, always building
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I’m blown away just by the fact you put a (Markdown file) URL into Docsify-This and then you get a URL back for a web page… done! Take the URL and go. It is so seamless. — J. Groom, Reclaim Today Episode 39 (Co-founder, Reclaim Hosting)
I’ve been using Docsify-This for my graduate publishing production course, partly to explore new models in markdown publishing, but partly also to tame Canvas, which I find awkward and cumbersome. Keeping all my course notes as plain text files and deploying them through Github and Docsify-this is easy and makes my course development a breeze. Plus, I keep all my materials locally, and can use re-use them without being reliant on Canvas. — J. Maxwell (Director & Associate Professor in the Publishing Program at Simon Fraser University)
Best tool I’ve found in years - this is one of those creations that is just done right, all the way to the core. — D. Malawey (Multidisciplinary Lab Coordinator, Texas A&M University)
Docsify-This has significantly improved my WordPress themes by being able to seamlessly embed into the interface the same documentation I use in the GitHub repository. This in turn has lead me to write better docs! I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Docsify-This can do as a simple-to-use web publishing tool. — A. Levine aka CogDog (Independent Educational Technologist)
The Docsify Open Course Starter Kit is a follow-up to Paul’s Grav Open Course Hub projects. The Docsify Kit provides a dead-easy(!) entry point to build content from scratch or migrate from existing Markdown files. The strength of the Docsify approach is the possibility of using GitHub Pages to provide a highly reliable hosting option. While some basic technical knowledge is expected, you can very easily and quickly update your course content once you get things going. — G. Chow (Instructor at Simon Fraser University, Canada)
I’ve found Paul Hibbitts’ Docsify Open MultiCourse Starter Kit was a fantastic way to get a course up and in the open quickly and I really appreciate how efficient it makes rolling content into a new shell for the new term. The aesthetics are great, and the open source foundation of the project is very appealing. I love that I can host my courses with GitHub Pages and that I can easily mirror content in my college’s CMS, Brightspace. On top of that, Paul has been very responsive when it comes to support and change requests, which has helped me to dial in my course to just the way I want it. — A. Blacquiere (DIGITAL Design + Development Faculty at North Island College)
The Grav Open Course Hub was easy to set up and get running and my students loved having a one-stop place to go to for their course content. I really love that it syncs with GitHub so easily and seamlessly. I was able to have an open, collaborative, easily updatable, fully version-controlled site up and running in little time, with fairly modest technical skills. On the student side, it is all beautiful and easy to use on any device! — M. Coster (Associate Professor at Griffith University)
I wanted to use something to get around the restrictions of our LMS. Everything was so plain vanilla there, and didn’t provide the flexibility I needed. Grav Open Course Hub was the perfect answer to my problem. Using the available documentation, I was able to get it up and running, integrating it into my Canvas course. I did run into a few issues - and Paul of HibbittsDesign.ORG was immediately available to help me get past them. I highly recommend trying it - I think you will like it and the support is fabulous! — C. Corritore (Professor at Heider College of Business, Creighton University)
The Grav Open Course Hub will allow TWU to deploy multiple versions of courses, all based on the same core content, to learners in widely diverse communities across the world. Since the core content of each course is centralized and versioned in GitHub, then displayed in Grav, we can ensure that all learners are interacting with the same content. Furthermore, since the content can be embedded directly into our LMS, we can build interactions, activities, and assessments unique to each community of learners, whether they are in India, Kenya, China or Canada. — Colin Madland (Online Learning and Instructional Technologies at Trinity Western University and PhD student in Educational Technology)
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Have you used one of Paul’s open source projects and would like to kindly contribute a quote to be included above? Please email me direct at [email protected] or connect with me on LinkedIn. Thank you!
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