Build your R-based course websites with this IHEID themed course website template and {blogdown}! Thought as a companion to the excellent {iheiddown} package, {coursedown} cuts down the time you’ll need to publish a fully functional course website to share R code with your students to an hour or two!

Getting started with {coursedown} is as simple as hitting the “Use this template” button above and creating your own repository. The only thing left to do then is to head over to Netlify to deploy your site. This will take no more than 15 minutes! For an illustrated walk-through, head over to the website to find a detailed user guide and check out the various possibilities the theme offers!

While the template itself does not depend on the following packages. Some of the scripts depend on packages. You can either delete the problematic lab scripts in the static/labs folder or install them before building your site by running the following commands:

install.packages("tidyverse")
install.packages("gapminder")

Bug reports and suggestions for improvements are welcome! Simply create an issue on GitHub or open up a PR.

The template was inspired by two other excellent blogdown sites: Alison Hill’s “Sharing on short notice” and Andrew Heiss’ Program Evaluation course and the present version of the demo site contains “lab pages” from Alison Hill’s site. These are only included for showcasing the possibilities of the site and will be replaced over the coming weeks.

I cannot recommend Alison Hill’s and Andrew Heiss’ blogs enough if you want to learn more about scientific publishing on the web in general or running a course on the web. Their blogs taught me most of what I know today!