How to create the best Interactive R Language Online Learning Platform from the views of R community?

Question

R offers a breadth and depth in statistical computing beyond what is available in commercial closed source products. Yet R remains, primarily, a programming language for the highly skilled statistician, and out of the reach of many. --- The R Journal Vol. ½, December 2009

Note: Name changed from Interactive R Language Online Learning Platform: CloudStat School

As stated, R is the best tool and is the lingua franca of statistics. But many people, especially my students found difficulties to use R.

I wish to make an interactive R Learning Platform, called CloudStat School.

The best way to learn R programming is doing while learning.

In CloudStat School, you will see a console box at your top left hand side, while the lesson notes at your top right. Bottom is the output box. Anything you “Run” in console box will be shown as a result in the output box.

So, while learning the notes, you can “run” the R examples immediately without open another windows, software or tabs. You can do it in a page.

I did make a simple working prototype: Lesson 1: Overview of R Language & CloudStat School

The prototype is simply integrating R Web that hosted in Pôle Bioinformatique Lyonnais in iframe.

If many of you think that this idea great, I would start making a better version.

This is my current simple idea, hope to get some feedback from you.

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

It would probably be much more resource intensive and require more effort to create, but check this out: I found Code Academy to be a fun way to tinker with JavaScript. Unfortunately the site is (so far) only for a single language and a closed-source, venture-backed startup.

The main problem is that Rweb (as I am learning right now) does execute everything in batch, so this interpreted line-by-line approach used in CA probably cannot be done with it. If you were to create a similar app to CA for R, you'd have to open an R session for every user, hence the resource intensiveness disadvantage stated above. Hope this can be overcome, maybe someone will have an idea.

Hope you find this useful, at least as an inspiration for your endeavors. I wish you the best of luck.