tl;dr : we propose three calls to action:Share your curricular materials in the open.Participate in the rOpenSci Education profile series.Discuss with us how you want to be involved in rOpenSci Educators’ Collaborative.

In the first post of this series, we sketched out some of the common challenges faced by educators who teach with R across scientific domains. In this post, we delve into what makes a “good” educational resource for teaching science with R. For instructors teaching sciences with R, there are a number of open educational resources that they can reuse, tailor to their own teaching style, or use to inspire them in creating their own materials.

Educators who teach science using R tend to face common pedagogical problems, regardless of their scientific domain. Yet instructors who teach with R often feel isolated at their institutions. They may be the only ones in their departments to teach using R. Even if there are others, the culture of collaboration around teaching is generally impoverished, unlike the rich culture of collaboration around research.

The gifski package which was demonstrated in May at eRum 2018 in Budapest is now on CRAN. Gifski is a simple but powerful package which can hopefully take away an important performance bottleneck for generating animated graphics in R. 🔗What is Gifski Gifski is a multi-threaded high-quality GIF encoder written in Rust. It can create animated GIF images with thousands of colors per frame and do so much faster than other software.

R packages are widely used in science, yet the code behind them often does not come under scrutiny. To address this lack, rOpenSci has been a pioneer in developing a peer review process for R packages. The goal of pkginspector is to help that process by providing a means to better understand the internal structure of R packages.

Evolutionary biologists are increasingly using R for building,editing and visualizing phylogenetic trees.The reproducible code-based workflow and comprehensive array of toolsavailable in packages such as ape,phangorn andphytools make R an ideal platform forphylogenetic analysis.Yet the many different tree formats are not well integrated,as pointed out in a recentpost.

It’s easy to come to a conference and feel intimidated by the wealth of knowledge and expertise of other attendees. As Ellen Ullman, a software engineer and writer describes, One of the best ways to start feeling less intimidated is to start talking to others. Ullman continues, At rOpenSci unconf18, we learned that it’s ok to feel like you don’t know everything – indeed, that’s how just about everyone feels!

Data == knowledge! Much of the data we use, whether it be fromgovernment repositories, social media, GitHub, or e-commerce sites comesfrom public-facing APIs. The quantity of data available is trulystaggering, but munging JSON output into a format that is easilyanalyzable in R is an equally staggering undertaking.

Part of rOpenSci’s mission is to create technical infrastructure in the form of carefully vetted R software tools that lower barriers to working with data sources on the web. Our open peer software review system for community-contributed tools is a key component of this. As the rOpenSci community grows and more package authors submit their work for peer review, we need to expand our editorial board to maintain a speedy process.

You can find members of the rOpenSci team at various meetings and workshops around the world. Come say ‘hi’, learn about how our software packages can enable your research, or about our process for open peer software review and onboarding, how you can get connected with the community or tell us how we can help you do open and reproducible research. 🔗Where’s rOpenSci?

🔗Introduction I never thought that I’d be programming software in my career. I startedusing R a little over 2 years now and it’s been one of the most importantdecisions in my career. Secluded in a small academic office with no oneto discuss/interact about my new hobby, I started searching the web fortutorials and packages. After getting to know how amazing and nurturingthe R community is, it made me want to become a data scientist.