The document presents an interactive e-learning platform named Datamind, designed for teaching data analysis using R, addressing the need for scalable learning tools due to a rapidly growing user base. It highlights features such as automated feedback through submission correctness tests, gamification, and the ability to create courses using R packages and web interfaces. Additionally, it emphasizes the platform's focus on practical coding skills and ease of access by running R in the cloud, thus eliminating installation issues for users.

1. An interactive e-learning platform
for Data Analysis based on R

2. Martijn Theuwissen
Dieter De Mesmaeker
Jonathan Cornelissen
Who we are!
Jonathan@datamind.org
Dieter@datamind.org
Martijn@datamind.org

3. You might know some of our side-projects!
www.Rdocumentation.org!
• Easily find and browse R
documentation!
• Comment & discuss!
• Future features!
• View package popularity
and rankings!
• Soon open-sourced!!
www.R-fiddle.org!
• Test and share R code in your
browser!
• Quickly share the results
without needing scrap projects
or files!
• Discussion area!
• Embed in your website or blog!!

4. Main takeaway!

5. 1. Motivation:
Why e-learning with and for R?
2. Learner experience
3. Technical overview
4. Course creators experience on DataMind
1. Web interface
2. R interface
5. Submission Correctness Tests (examples)
6. Questions and answers?

6. Why e-learning with and for R?
Need for scalable tools to learn
R and Data Analysis…

7. Because of exponentially growing R user base
More than 2 million R users growing at 40-60% yearly
Source: http://r4stats.com/articles/popularity/ and http://prezi.com/s1qrgfm9ko4i/the-r-ecosystem/

8. Source: http://r4stats.com/articles/popularity/
6,275 R packages at all major repositories, 4,315 of which were at CRAN
Across a broad spectrum of domains: Financial engineering, biostatistics, data
mining, …
Because of the exponentially growing functionality

9. Keyword Competition Global2Monthly2Searches
r"tutorial 0 6600
introduction"to"r 0 1600
online"statistics"course 0.98 1600
ggplot2"tutorial 0 880
statistics"course 0.85 880
an"introduction"to"r 0.01 880
r"book 0.06 590
learning"statistics 0.38 590
r"tutorials 0 590
r"introduction 0.01 480
statistics"courses 0.84 480
statistics"introduction 0.1 480
online"statistics"courses 0.99 320
r"course 0.04 260
r"training 0.17 260
free"online"statistics"course 0.56 260
statistics"training 0.62 210
online"statistics"class 0.98 170
statistics"class"online 0.98 140
data"analysis"tutorial 0.5 110
Analysis of r-project.org Analysis of Google keywords
Compare to:
SAS tutorial: 4400
Eviews tutorial: 390
Stata tutorial: 1900
Matlab tutorial: 22200
Hadoop tutorial: 12100
Source: Analysis based on
http://cran.r-project.org/report_cran.html
Source: Analysis based on
http://adwords.google.com/select/
keywordtoolexternal
That needs to learn the basics and the specifics of R
• Number of downloads per month for:
• Introduction to R pdfs: 140.000
• Summary pdfs: 50.000

10. Why e-learning with and for R?

11. • Great books, tutorials,… on R
• But coding is learned by doing
• No online learning interface for R
• Documentation made by experts for
experts, not for beginners or
intermediate users
Learners : Students, Professionals, Researchers, Employees
Why e-learning with and for R?

12. • Great books, tutorials,… on R
• But coding is learned by doing
• No online learning interface for R
• Documentation made by experts for
experts, not for beginners or
intermediate users
Teachers :
Learners :
• Often give the same or similar feedback
to students in exercise sessions
• Manually correct assignments
• Static content
• Hard to get feedback
Students, Professionals, Researchers, Employees
Why e-learning with and for R?
Data Analysis Professors, Consultants, Researchers, Book authors

13. Inspired by other learning-by-doing platforms…
This time for R!
www.codecademy.com
www.codeschool.com
tryR.codeschool.com

14. Benefits for students of learning R online
1. Everything in one place:
assignments, sample code, R-console, …
2. Lowering the barrier:
start right-away with R, no installation, version
problems, .. since R runs in the background on
our servers
3. Automated correction and feedback
through Submission Correctness Tests (SCT)
4. Gamification
more fun while learning

15. LIVE DEMO
Surf to
http://www.datamind.org

16. Technical overview
DataMind IT architecture

17. R
Open-source
statistical
language
DataMind leverages state of the art open-
source frameworks in the cloud
• Scaling
• Automated
• Affordable

18. • Scalable
• Plug & Play
• Easy
Rserve
Ruby on Rails
High productivity
web application
framework
Node.js
Platform for real-
time scalable
network applications
R
Open-source
statistical
language
DataMind leverages state of the art open-
source frameworks in the cloud

19. WebSockets
AJAX requests
Rserve
Ruby on Rails
High productivity
web application
framework
Node.js
Platform for real-
time scalable
network applications
RESTful
API
R
Open-source
statistical
language
Angular.js
MVC JavaScript
framework for single-
page applications,
maintained by Google
DataMind leverages state of the art open-
source frameworks in the cloud

20. Rserve: Communication with R
• Package of Simon Urbanek
• Manages sessions and workspaces
• Binary communication
• Emulate console with capture.output()
• Detect incomplete statements with parse()
• Catch and print errors

21. RAppArmor: Security
• Evaluation of external code
è Huge security risk
• Solution:
• Limited access to OS
• RAppArmor
• Package of Jeroen Ooms
• R-interface to OS Security
• Limit CPU, Memory, Spawned processes

22. Course creators experience on DataMind
How to create your own course?
STEP 1: The elements of an interactive exercise
STEP 2: Using the web or R interface to create an exercise
STEP 3: Explaining interactivity

23. STEP 1: The elements of an interactive exercise
1. Write your assignment
Write the assignment for
your exercise

24. STEP 1: The elements of an interactive exercise
1. Write your assignment
2. Write your instructions
Provide instructions to
student

25. STEP 1: The elements of an interactive exercise
1. Write your assignment
2. Write your instructions
3. Provide sample code
Provide sample code to
help student getting
started

26. STEP 1: The elements of an interactive exercise
1. Write your assignment
2. Write your instructions
3. Provide sample code
Pre-exercise code is run
in the background to pre-
load a dataset, graphs,
etc.

27. STEP 1: The elements of an interactive exercise
1. Write your assignment
2. Write your instructions
3. Provide sample code
4. Provide sample solution
Provide help with a
sample solution

28. STEP 1: The elements of an interactive exercise
1. Write your assignment
2. Write your instructions
3. Provide sample code
4. Provide sample solution
5. Write your submission correctness test
Write Submission
Correctness Test in R
that checks student input
and returns feedback

29. STEP 1: The elements of an interactive exercise
1. Write your assignment
2. Write your instructions
3. Provide sample code
4. Provide sample solution
5. Write your submission correctness test

30. STEP 2: Using the web or R interface to create an
exercise
Datamind R Package to create your own
courses:
• www.datamind.org/#/CC/help
• https://github.com/jonathancornelissen/
datamind
Web Interface to create your own courses:
• www.datamind.org/#/dashboard
LIVE DEMO

31. STEP 2: Using R Markdown and the datamind Package
1. Install the datamind R package

32. STEP 2: Using R Markdown and the datamind Package
1. Install the datamind R package
2. Author a course

33. STEP 2: Using R Markdown and the datamind Package
1. Install the datamind R package
2. Author a course
3. Preview your chapter locally

34. STEP 2: Using R Markdown and the datamind Package
1. Install the datamind R package
2. Author a course
3. Preview your chapter locally
4. Log in to DataMind.org

35. STEP 2: Using R Markdown and the datamind Package
1. Install the datamind R package
2. Author a course
3. Preview your chapter locally
4. Log in to DataMind.org
5. Upload a chapter to DataMind

36. STEP 2: Using R Markdown and the datamind Package
1. Install the datamind R package
2. Author a course
3. Preview your chapter locally
4. Log in to DataMind.org
5. Upload a chapter to DataMind
6. Share the love
Special thanks to Ramnath Vaidyanathan
Author of Slidify Package

37. Submission Correctness Tests
STEP 3: Explaining Interactivity

38. Submission Correctness Tests (SCT)
A Submission Correctness Test checks the input from a student
and returns
(i) whether the student’s input was correct and
(ii) feedback to student.
• These tests are written in R
• Should be easy for a course creator
-> started developing a datamind R package to aid course
creators to write simple tests*
*h$ps://github.com/jonathancornelissen/datamind
"Mistakes are not errors but partially correct solutions with underlying
logic."
STEP 3: Explaining Interactivity

39. 1. Assignment to student: x should be 5
2. Student types:
x <- 4
3. Submission Correctness Test:
if( x == 5 ){
DM.result <- list(TRUE, “Well done, you genius!”)
}else{
DM.result <- list(FALSE, “Please assign 5 to x”)
}
4. Output to student
“Please assign 5 to x”
A Simple Submission Correctness Tests (SCT)
STEP 3: Explaining Interactivity

40. 1. Assignment to student: x should be 5
2. Student types:
x <- 5
3. Submission Correctness Test:
if( x == 5 ){
DM.result <- list(TRUE, “Well done, you genius!”)
}else{
DM.result <- list(FALSE, “Please assign 5 to x”)
}
4. Output to student
“Well done, you genius!”
A Simple Submission Correctness Tests (SCT)
STEP 3: Explaining Interactivity

41. • Everything in the student’s workspace
• DM.user.code
all code written by student
• DM.console.output
everything printed to user console
INPUT
Automated exercise correction with SCT
Assignment to the student:
Print a matrix with 3 rows
containing the numbers 1 up to 9
If Student does this correctly
then:
DM.console.ouput contains
[,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,] 1 2 3
[2,] 4 5 6
[3,] 7 8 9
STEP 3: Explaining Interactivity

42. • Everything in the student’s workspace
• DM.user.code
all code written by student
• DM.console.output
everything printed to user console
INPUT
Automated exercise correction with SCT
Assignment to the student:
Print a matrix with 3 rows
containing the numbers 1 up to 9
If Student does this correctly
then:
DM.console.ouput contains
[,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,] 1 2 3
[2,] 4 5 6
[3,] 7 8 9
STEP 3: Explaining Interactivity
Submission Correctness Test written by course
creator (potentially using datamind package)
DM.result <- output_contains("matrix(1:9,
byrow=TRUE, nrow=3)”)

43. • Everything in the student’s workspace
• DM.user.code
all code written by student
• DM.console.output
everything printed to user console
INPUT
Automated exercise correction with SCT
Assignment to the student:
Print a matrix with 3 rows
containing the numbers 1 up to 9
If Student does this correctly
then:
DM.console.ouput contains
[,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,] 1 2 3
[2,] 4 5 6
[3,] 7 8 9
STEP 3: Explaining Interactivity
Submission Correctness Test written by course
creator (potentially using DM package)
DM.result <- output_contains("matrix(1:9,
byrow=TRUE, nrow=3)”)
• Assigned to variable DM.result
• List with two elements
1. TRUE / FALSE
2. Message to provide to student with
feedback
DM.result is shown to student
OUTPUT

44. STEP 3: Explaining Interactivity
Has the student estimated a certain model
correctly?
Generated a transformed time series that fulfills
certain conditions?
Generated a certain type of graph ?
Forecasted a metric of interest within certain
bounds?
…
SCT enable wide variety of options

45. Main takeaway!
Become a course creator:info@DataMind.org

46. Q&AQuestions and Answers