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The St. Olaf RStudio Server, now known as Posit Workbench, is set up with an R Addin named RStudio Course Management System (RCMS) that allows teachers to set up their own course folders for sharing course files and facilitating student work and sharing. Once a course has been set up and participants added, no further interaction with the RCMS Addin is necessary. In addition to teacher setup, each student will have to open the Addin once on their own, in order for links to the shared course content to be created in their R home directory. This article includes links to detailed instructions and videos documenting each step of the process.
Creating the course
There are two options for creating a directory to manage your course R materials, either as a standalone course for a single/non-shared multisection course, or for a multisection course where files will be shared between sections. While both courses are created fundamentally the same way, it is important to make the distinction between a course for a section in a shared vs. non-shared multisection course. For a non-shared course, the course letter is entered (as detailed in the article linked below) WITH the course number, and for a shared course, the letter is selected from a drop-down list.
Setting up an RStudio course folder
Getting students access to the course
Once you have created the course and added students, you'll need to instruct them to also access the RCMS Addin to create the shortcuts to the course in their R home directory. This is a one-time action that they need to take in order to have links created to allow them to access the shared folders for the course. If, for some reason, they delete the shortcut folder for the course from their home drive, they can always go back to the Addin and recreate the links to the course. Sending the link below to the HelpDesk article and walk-through video should be sufficient for them to set up their access prior to the course, as soon as you have added them to the course list.
Joining an RStudio Course as a Student or TA
Joining a multisection course as an additional instructor
If you are teaching a section of a multisection course, and you were not the creator of the course, you don't need to do any course setup, you simply need to open the RCMS Addin to have links to the course added to your home drive and then manage participants for your section(s). This is quite straightforward once you open the Addin, but the link below shows detailed steps for the process, with a link to video explaining how to get set up. Once this has been done, you can follow the steps above for adding teachers, students, or TAs.
Joining an RStudio course as a teacher
Adding students to the course/updating participants
The owner of each course section is responsible for maintaining the list of participants for their section. Since this list isn't automatically synced with registration, instructors will need to manually go to the RCMS Addin to add or remove students. As detailed in the linked article, this is best done for students by using the Roster list from Moodle, as that is synced with the Registrar and has updated registration information. Updating by copying this list and pasting it over an existing list of students in the RCMS will both add new students and remove those who have withdrawn. Teachers and TAs can be manually added and removed as described.
Adding students and TAs to your course
Removing participants from the course
When participants are removed from the course, either manually or through a list update as described above, they are denied access to the shared Class folder, and lose write privileges to other folders (their personal directory and the Project directory), but retain viewing permissions to their work. As described below for multisection courses, it is necessary to lock the course at some point to completely ensure that they (and others without specific access) no longer can view files in the Class directory.
Removing participants from a course
Locking a multisection course
Due to sharing restrictions of the server, it is necessary for multisection courses to be set up such that the Class folder is open to anyone with access to the R server. When students are given access to a course, they have a link added to their home directory that is controlled by the teacher of their section. If that teacher removes them from the course, the link to the Class folder will no longer work, effectively cutting off access to those files. However, if that student went searching through the server folder structure through the RStudio terminal, it is conceivable that they could find their way to the folder and view these files. To protect these files from being seen by anyone not specifically currently listed as a student in one of the course sections, the course owner can lock the course, which both grants specific access to each currently active participant, and then locks out anyone not in that list. This has the effect that once a course is locked, teachers other than the course owner, can no longer add participants to their sections. If this becomes necessary, the course owner can temporarily reverse the lock while the participant is added and then re-lock the course as detailed in the link below.
Locking a multisection course