Hi all, I love all of these options - and am really excited to see them, thank you for sharing!!!
I would like to say that I actually try, as much as possible, to solve those pesky errors on students’ computers if at all humanely possible to do so (or to win the battle with wrong access rights/permissions with university IT departments beforehand - thankfully, python and R have become widely used enough that there are usually no questions as to WHY a learner may want these tools installed on their machine). The reason for this is that I really feel that students want to walk away from our workshops being able to solve one of their own problems, which usually involves their own machine (with all of its drawbacks) and their own data - so having them use an external environment they can ’t easily reproduce at home may limit their ability to achieve this. Do colaboratory and/or binder and/or any of the other tools deal with this in an efficient way??? Thanks, Darya -----Original Message----- From: Kerchner, Daniel <[email protected]> Reply: discuss <[email protected]> Date: 17 September 2018 at 11:29:35 pm To: discuss <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [discuss] Backup options for R and python for participants experiencing technical problems > Hi Katrin, > > I had been having my students install Anaconda on their laptops to work in > Jupyter notebooks. There are always a few who have trouble installing. > This time I actually tried having everybody load the .ipynb files into Google > Colaboratory . All you need there is a > gmail/Google Drive account, which is a reasonable prerequisite. It > actually didn't take much at all to ensure that my iPython notebook > (developed in Jupyter) ran quite smoothly in Google Colab. The few who > for whatever reason had issues with that, used Anaconda as a fallback. > > I haven't smoothed out the process of having students read "local" data > files that are on their computers, so during the PANDAS portion, I just > have them read it in from a URL, and that works just fine. > > We also have a JupyterHub server set up at my institution, which is my > other backup option! > > Good to know about RStudioCloud - thank you for that! > > Best, > Dan > > > > > > > > *Dan Kerchner Senior Software Developer, Scholarly Technology Group The > George Washington University Libraries Gelman Library 2130 H Street, NW > Washington, DC 20052 [email protected] * > > On Sun, Sep 16, 2018 at 2:17 PM, Katrin Tirok via discuss < > [email protected]> wrote: > > > Hi all, > > > > I am thinking about good and easy 'backup' options for R and/or python > > that workshop participants could use when they have technical issues with > > their computer that take longer to sort out. Most of my previous workshops > > ran smoothly, but I remember one workshop with R this year, where we had a > > number of problems with packages that did not install or did not load > > properly, it was a mix of too old R versions and missing rights on machines. > > > > In South Africa we have additional challenges, like old and and very slow > > computers, which can take minutes to generate a plot in R, or very slow > > internet connection, making it difficult to install packages on the fly. > > > > I just discovered RStudioCloud https://rstudio.cloud providing full > > Rstudio setup in the web and the service is offered for free at the moment. > > I also started experimenting with Rstudio Server on my workgroup's server, > > however this would only work within my institution. > > And I know that under Windows one can run Rstudio from a usb drive ... > > > > I would like to hear what other people do in such situations ... > > > > Thanks > > > > Katrin > > *The Carpentries * / discuss / > > see discussions + > > participants + > delivery > > options > > Permalink > > > > ------------------------------------------ The Carpentries: discuss Permalink: https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/T963f4b806cda01a2-M9abc3772da599a7fc1720263 Delivery options: https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/subscription
