Introduction to interactive tutorials

Objectives

To introduce the {learnr} and {gradethis} packages and show how to use it to create interactive tutorials. These interactive tools allow the students to run R code directly in the tutorial, to answer to questions and to receive immediate feedback.

Intended public of this course

When we designed this workshop, we had in mind Josefina, Francisco and Alex as our learner personas.

• Josefina: teaches R at University. She is interested in giving automated feedback to the R exercises given to her students.

• Francisco: is a professional developer and wants to explore the interactive tutorials as possible part of the help and documentation of his packages.

• Alex: wants to develop tutorials to publish them as shiny applications so that their students could start right away with R without painful installations.

Not included in this workshop

Since we only have 3 hours, a lot of things will be out of reach of the workshop. Among other things, we will not learn:

• Programming techniques
• Theory of pedagogy
• Rmarkdown
• Package development

Duration

This is a 3-hour workshop with intervals (ideally away from any screen) of approximately 5 minutes for every 50 minutes of content.

Sample schedule

Duration (min)	Activity
5	Time to connect and make sure your audio and video connection is good (if you don’t have a camera it doesn’t matter, but if you do, it helps)
10	Introduction to the course
15	What is an interactive tutorial?
15	How can I add questions to my tutorial?
10	Break
15	How can I include coding exercises in my tutorial?
15	How can I check the coding exercises in my tutorial?
15	How can I share my tutorials?
10	Where could I learn more about {learnr} tutorials?
5	End of the workshop: summary and feedback

Chapter 1

• Question: What is an interactive tutorial?
• Goals:
  • Understand the benefits of an interactive tutorial
  • Understand the basic different parts of the {learnr} tutorials
• Practice:
  • Analyze a {learnr} tutorial template and recognize the different parts. Modify options in the YAML and analyze the changes.

Chapter 2

• Question: How can I add questions to my tutorial?
• Goals:
  • Understand the different type of questions
  • Understand the basic components of multiple choice questions
  • Understand the basic components of text questions
• Practice: Modify some of the questions of the tutorial provided for this exercise.

Chapter 3

• Question: How can I include coding exercises in my tutorial?
• Goals:
  • Understand the basic components of the exercises
  • Understand the chunk exercise
  • Understand the chunk hint
  • Understand the chunk solution
  • Understand the default set up of the chunks
• Practice: Modify an exercise chunk in order to provide a hint and a solution

Chapter 4

• Question: How can I check the coding exercises in my tutorial?
• Goals:
  • Understand the different ways to check code exercises
  • Understand the advantages and shortages of the different options
• Practice: Modify an exercise checking test to provide more feedback.

Chapter 5

• Question: How can I share my tutorials?
• Goals:
  • Understand the different ways to publish/share a {learnr} tutorial
  • Understand the advantages and shortages of the different options
• Practice: Publish the tutorial as a Shiny App

Chapter 6

• Question: Where can I learn more?
• Goals:
  • Details of sites to learn more about {learnr}
  • Details of the packages that can be combined with {learnr}
  • Details of repositories with code that generate learnr tutorials.

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Some part of this course were developed for MetaDocencia. (2021 - 2022)