Write learnr Tutorials

[emilyriederer]

It was just announced that RStudio 1.3 will have a nice interface for running interactive tutorials built with the learnr package. This potentially creates a whole new opportunity for thinking about how packages are generally documented and evangelized -- essentially interactive vignettes.

It could be a cool project to explore how to best use this new capability / integration. For example, team members could:

• take existing vignettes and think about what an 'interactive' version could look like
• write new tutorials / interactive vignettes for packages they love that they believe are underutilized
• develop tutorials that show the interaction between R packages they use or thematically related R packages (e.g. CRAN task views)

[maurolepore]

I would like to learn how learnr tutorials are distributed in packages.

[schloerke]

Feel free to tag me with questions! (@schloerke)

[rpodcast]

I really want to start leveraging learnr a lot more! My esteemed colleague Will Landau has made some top-notch drake tutorials that leverage learnr in his learndrake package, and that might be a good source of inspiration for what we could accomplish. Also I'd be interested to see if we can make a learnr tutorial that helps a user walk through an intermediate/complex Shiny app.

[schloerke]

@rpodcast

learndrake

That's a great demo! Thank you pointing me to it!

see if we can make a learnr tutorial that helps a user walk through an intermediate/complex Shiny app.

😞Unfortunately, the current design of learnr it done as "compute, then display". There is no opportunity for async / shiny supported output. htmlwidgets is allowed as it's a single R computation and the interaction is done within the browser.

[maurolepore]

I would like to write a learnr tutorial based on the Software Carpentry lesson Programming with R.

The motivation is to develop the materials to teach this workshop for Rice University (I would love to have a co-teacher or helper that expands the limited diversity that @jdhoffa and I represent -- please let me know). That workshop started as a traditional Carpentries workshop (2 full-day, in-person) and became a 2 half-day online workshop. Because it's no longer official, I have more flexibility and would love to take the chance to build a product that others can reuse.

Properties I imagine:

• Meets a curated list of the most important objectives from Programming with R but focuses on the most rewarding and safest workflows -- which often differ from what traditional lessons by the carpentries (think tidyverse versus base R, and think project-oriented workflow versus setwd()).
• Applies ideas from Teaching Online at Short Notice, by Greg Wilson (and by @lauracion, @paocorrales, et al for Latin America via https://metadocencia.netlify.com/).
• Can be used by instructors of remote or in person workshops, but can also be used by individuals or groups without an instructor (videos would replace the need of an instructor). For example, librarians could organize the workshop using their resources; or you could use it to teach your co-workers in your organization.