DataMind interactive learning: Dublin R User Group: September 2013

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

Martijn Theuwissen

Dieter De Mesmaeker

Jonathan Cornelissen

Who we are!

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

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!!

Main takeaway!

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?

Why e-learning with and for R?

Need for scalable tools to learn

R and Data Analysis…

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/

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

Keyword Competition Global2Monthly2Searchesr"tutorial 0 6600introduction"to"r 0 1600online"statistics"course 0.98 1600ggplot2"tutorial 0 880statistics"course 0.85 880an"introduction"to"r 0.01 880r"book 0.06 590learning"statistics 0.38 590r"tutorials 0 590r"introduction 0.01 480statistics"courses 0.84 480statistics"introduction 0.1 480online"statistics"courses 0.99 320r"course 0.04 260r"training 0.17 260free"online"statistics"course 0.56 260statistics"training 0.62 210online"statistics"class 0.98 170statistics"class"online 0.98 140data"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

•  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


•  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


Data Analysis Professors, Consultants, Researchers, Book authors

Inspired by other learning-by-doing platforms… This time for R!

www.codecademy.com

www.codeschool.com

tryR.codeschool.com

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

LIVE DEMO Surf to

http://www.datamind.org

Technical overview DataMind IT architecture

R Open-source statistical language

DataMind leverages state of the art open-source frameworks in the cloud

•  Scaling •  Automated •  Affordable

•  Scalable •  Plug & Play •  Easy

Rserve

Ruby on Rails High productivity web application framework

Node.js Platform for real-time scalable network applications



WebSockets

AJAX requests

Rserve

Ruby on Rails High productivity web application framework

Node.js Platform for real-time scalable network applications

RESTful API


Angular.js MVC JavaScript framework for single-page applications, maintained by Google


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

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

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

STEP 1: The elements of an interactive exercise

1. Write your assignment

Write the assignment for your exercise


1. Write your assignment 2. Write your instructions

Provide instructions to student



3. Provide sample code

Provide sample code to help student getting

started



3. Provide sample code

Pre-exercise code is run in the background to pre-load a dataset, graphs,

etc.



3. Provide sample code 4. Provide sample solution

Provide help with a sample solution



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


1.  Write your assignment 2.  Write your instructions

3.  Provide sample code 4.  Provide sample solution

5.  Write your submission correctness test

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

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





4.  Log in to DataMind.org 5.  Upload a chapter to DataMind





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

Submission Correctness Tests

STEP 3: Explaining Interactivity

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."


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)


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)


•  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





INPUT


[,1] [,2] [,3] [1,] 1 2 3 [2,] 4 5 6 [3,] 7 8 9


Submission Correctness Test written by course creator (potentially using datamind package)

DM.result <- output_contains("matrix(1:9, byrow=TRUE, nrow=3)”)




INPUT


[,1] [,2] [,3] [1,] 1 2 3 [2,] 4 5 6 [3,] 7 8 9


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


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

Main takeaway!

Become a course creator:[email protected]

Q&A Questions and Answers

DataMind interactive learning: Dublin R User Group: September 2013

Technology

Transcript of DataMind interactive learning: Dublin R User Group: September 2013