courseR

This package features a toolset for creating and updating website content for courses taught in R, especially in a managed environment running RStudio and/or Shiny servers.

Quick start

Install from github:

devtools::install_github("whitwort/courseR")

Start a new project in the current working directory (by default, some example content will be created):

courseR::init()

Build a website and package with:

courseR::build()

See courseR.yml for configuration options and files in templates/ to customize the generated website and R package.

You can preview the website by opening files in the dist/ subdirectory. Then, after setting things up in courseR.yml publish your website and course application with:

courseR::publish()

Components

There are currently a few components, all of which are configurable from the courseR.yml file created after calling courseR::init:

• Website generation. Source R Markdown files are built into "hand-out" style web pages and reveal.js slides. Use courseR::newContent() to get a fresh course content R Markdown file.
• Course package. By default courseR creates a course-specific R package; this is useful when students are interacting with R on a managed server, especially if you're also running RStudio Server. The course package exports some convenience functions like courseR::website, but also helps implement a course assignment workflow. The course package is built when you call courseR::build and published to a global R path defined in courseR.yml with courseR::publish.
• Assignments. Assignment documents, templated with courseR::newAssignment are built to reference solutions by instructors in the course and scaffolded into assignment R Markdowns files for students. The assignments component depends on the course package and provides automatic code checking facilities (via checkr) and a Shiny grading app.
• Projects. Provides some infrastructure for helping students in the class to deploy Shiny apps to a Shiny Server instance. This component is disable by default; see courseR.yml for instructions about how to enable it.

Version

• 0.5 Re-implementation and overhaul of grading application; now integrates with checkr while maintaining original pedagogical goal of showing students an answer key as their target.
• 0.4 Yup, it happened again. The new rmarkdown::render_site supercedes most of what this package used to do. Also added v2.0 of the course package implementation.
• 0.3 Rewritten to leaverage new features in RMarkdown v2.0
• 0.2 Rewritten to use whisker for templating and make heavier use of new Knitr features
• 0.1 Initital experiment in developing a workflow to produce both handout-style webpages and HTML slides from a common set of markdown sources.

Credits

• rmarkdown and in-turn pandoc for most of the heavy-lifting behind website creation
• Twitter bootstrap for layout and styles
• Shiny for interactive assignment apps

License

Copyright © 2013-2017 Gregg Whitworth and licensed under GPLv3.