Alex Pijyan (Columbia University)
Abstract
"Students in higher education arrive with different backgrounds, interests, and college-preparation levels. Some learn best by reading textbooks, some find it sufficient to glance through the annotated lecture notes, and some students may need access to additional resources to succeed in class. Thus, the crucial and integral part of curricular development is designing courses for various access points into the material, so that all students have equal opportunities to engage in the classroom activities and learn in ways they are most likely to benefit from.
Having multiple access points is especially important when teaching programming classes or courses that involve computational components in their curriculum. Providing regular annotated slides might not serve the purpose of these classes as they don’t fully illustrate the capability of the programming software used in the class. On the other hand, providing only scripts will lack explanations and reasonings behind each chunk of code given in the file and might confuse students.
In this workshop, we will explore ways of communicating with students and sharing class materials using RMarkdown combined with the Bookdown and Shiny packages. The Bookdown package allows users to create online books (lecture notes), combine codes with plain texts, and incorporate interactive applications in class materials. Through examples and hands-on practice, participants will learn how to create an online book with various applications and make it available to students via GitHub pages.
Participants must bring their own laptops and have R software installed. Familiarity with R is recommended."