Classroom Management with RStudio Server Professional

Abstract

Both authors have taught courses at Bentley University in which they require students to do work in R (R Core Team 2016) using RStudio (RStudio Team 2015) and RMarkdown (Allaire, Cheng, Xie, McPherson, Chang, Allen, Wickham, Atkins, and Hyndman 2016). For Dr. Oury, this has included graduate-level courses in data mining, data science, and machine learning. For Dr. Carter, it includes a single undergraduate course in discrete mathematics. In these courses, many of the homework assignments, handouts, slides, and projects are given to students in RMarkdown format. Students are expected to submit work in the same format. This paper introduces a new RStudio addin, called “Simple Course Management System,” that facilitates the exchange, grading, and real-time supervision of student work in RStudio. It also discusses the results of using the addin in a course in Fall 2016, and suggests future extensions. We assume readers are familiar with each of these tools (R, RStudio, RMarkdown, and RStudio Server Professional), but any who are not can learn about their value in the classroom from previous work, such as Baumer, Cetinkaya-Rundel, Bray, Loi, and Horton (2014) and Cetinkaya-Rundel and Rundel (2017). Readers who will find the addin of benefit to their own teaching will find installation instructions in the addin’s GitHub repository (Carter 2017). The source code is released under the LGPL version 3. Readers who wish to participate in the development of the addin are welcome to submit pull requests to that same repository.