Teaching statistics interactively with webR

RSS/RoSE UK Statistics Education Meeting
22 November 2023

Nicola Rennie

About me

Lecturer in Health Data Science at Lancaster University.

Academic background in statistics, and experience in data science consultancy.

Committee member for RSS Teaching Statistics Section.

Communications team and co-lead for Statistical Software SIG at RoSE Network.

CHICAS logo

How many of you teach R for statistics?

How many of you mention R in a lecture environment?

Problems with R in a lecture environment

Screenshots of code are harder to describe
Live coding increases pressure as a demonstrator
Switching between windows (slides/RStudio) feels clunky
Hard for students to run the code themselves

What is webR?

webR is a version of R that runs in a web browser.

You don’t need to install R.
You don’t need to setup a server.
It just works (even on your phone).

webR logo

webR demo

Advantages of webR

Write and run code without switching between slides and RStudio.
Students can engage with code in lectures on their phones.
No set up required for students (and easy to fix mistakes!)
Easy to create slides using Quarto that contain code blocks that are empty, have comments, or have pre-filled code.
Deploy Shiny apps for free with unlimited usage, with one line of code and a GitHub account.

Limitations of webR

Requires an internet connection.
Package installation is a little bit different.

webr::install("dplyr")

Not a replacement for workshops. Teaching R/RStudio/package installation is still important.

webR research questions

Does webR increase engagement in a lecture environment?
Does webR increase understanding of how code links to methodology?
Does webR increase confusion around how packages and IDEs work?

Resources

webR demo slides: learning-statistics-with-webr.netlify.app
webR demo source code: github.com/nrennie/learning-statistics-with-webR
Slides: nrennie.rbind.io/talks/rss-rose-statistics-education-2023