The {webexercises} package

The goal of webexercises is to enable instructors to easily create interactive web pages that students can use in self-guided learning. Although webexercises has fewer features than RStudio’s learnr package, it is more lightweight: whereas {learnr} tutorials must be either hosted on a shiny server or run locally, webexercises creates standalone HTML files that require only a JavaScript-enabled browser. It is also extremely simple to use.

Installation

You can install webexercises from CRAN using:

install.packages("webexercises")

You can install the development version from GitHub with:

devtools::install_github("psyteachr/webexercises")

Creating interactive widgets with inline code

The webexercises package provides functions that create HTML widgets using inline R code. These functions are:

function widget description
fitb() text box fill-in-the-blank question
mcq() pull-down menu multiple choice question
torf() pull-down menu TRUE or FALSE question
longmcq() radio buttons MCQs with long answers
hide() and unhide() button solution revealed when clicked
total_correct() text updating total correct

The appearance of the text box and pull-down menu widgets changes when users enter the correct answer. Answers can be either static or dynamic (i.e., specified using R code). Widget styles can be changed using style_widgets().

Examples are provided in the Web Exercises R Markdown template. To create a file from the webexercises template in RStudio, click File -> New File... -> RMarkdown and in the dialog box that appears, select From Template and choose Web Exercises.

Alternatively (or if you’re not using RStudio) use:

rmarkdown::draft("exercises.Rmd", "webexercises", "webexercises")

Knit the file to HTML to see how it works. Note: The widgets only function in a JavaScript-enabled browser.

Bookdown

You can add webexercises to a bookdown project or start a new bookdown project using add_webex_to_bookdown().

# create a new book
# use default includes and scripts directories (include and R)
add_webexercises_to_bookdown(bookdown_dir = "demo_bs4",
                             output_format = "bs4_book",
                             render = TRUE)

add_webexercises_to_bookdown(bookdown_dir = "demo_git",
                             output_format = "gitbook",
                             render = TRUE)

add_webexercises_to_bookdown(bookdown_dir = "demo_html",
                             output_format = "html_book",
                             render = TRUE)

add_webexercises_to_bookdown(bookdown_dir = "demo_tufte",
                             output_format = "tufte_html_book",
                             render = TRUE)

# update an existing book with custom include and script directories
add_webexercises_to_bookdown(bookdown_dir = ".",
                             include_dir = "www",
                             script_dir = "scripts",
                             output_format = "gitbook")

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