carriewright11 / itcr_example

ITCR_Course_Template

This template includes all of the files that you need to get started creating your course in R Markdown using the bookdown package. This is useful as this package allows you to preview your course easily from RStudio and to eventually host a book on GitHub and Leanpub.

Creating your course

As you modify the names of the chapters of your course and add more chapters (using the .Rmd files), you need to update the _bookdown.yml file accordingly.

For example let's say that we added another chapter and named the file 03-chapter_of_course.Rmd. We would update our _bookdown.yml to look like this:

book_filename: "ITCR_Course_Name"
chapter_name: "Chapter "
repo: https://github.com/jhudsl/ITCR_Course_Template/ ##Make sure you update this for your GitHub Repo!!
rmd_files: ["index.Rmd",
"01-intro.Rmd",
"02-chapter_of_course.Rmd",
"03-chapter_of_course.Rmd", ##Only this is new! "about.Rmd"]
new_session: yes
delete_merged_file: true
language:
ui:
chapter_name: "Chapter "
output_dir: "docs"

Notice how only one line is different - the one that says 03-chapter_of_course.Rmd", Be careful about quotation marks: "" as well as commas: ,!

Once we do this we can preview the book!

You can do so by typing: bookdown::serve_book() in the RStudio Console.

You will then see a live version of your book in your RStudio viewer.

Getting your course ready for Leanpub

We also include the necessary files to allow you to get your course ready for publication on Leanpub. These are located in the manuscript directory. When you are happy with your book using bookdown, then you just need to follow a few steps to copy the necessary files from your docs directory into the manuscript directory. The docs directory is auto-generated by the bookdown package. You need to copy time images directory as well as the .md files.

If you are comfortable using commands like the following, you can do this in a more automated way in the RStudio terminal:

cp docs/*.md manuscript
cp -r docs/images/ manuscript/resources/images

Finally you need to modify the Book.txt file in the manuscript directory to include the .md files that you wish in the order that you would like. We have also included a quiz example. If you wanted two quizzes (one called quiz_1.md and one called quiz_2.md) you could duplicate and modify quiz_1.md for your needs and then you could make the Book.txt file look like this (assuming you created a chapter called "03-chapter_of_course.Rmd" and you wanted quiz_1 to be after 02-chapter-of_course and quiz_2 to be after 03_chapter_of_course:

01-intro.md
02-chapter_of_course.md
quiz_1.md
03-chapter_of_course.md
quiz_2.md
about.md

Note that any .md files with an # in front of the name in the Book.txt file will be ignored by Leanpub. We have included an example of this in the Book.txt file.

Hosting your course on Leanpub

To then host your course on Leanpub follow these steps:

1. Make a Leanpub account here: https://leanpub.com/

2. Start a course

• click on the 3 line menu button
• click the author tab on the far left
• click Courses
• click the text that says create a new course
• fill out all the necessary information
• select using Git and GitHub (if you work with us at JHU there is a different protocol)
• press the add to plan button

3. Preview a new version

• click on the 3 line menu button
• click the author tab on the far left
• click Courses
• click on your course name/icon
• click "Preview New Version"
• click Create Preview button

4. Once you are ready and you like your course, you can click the "Publish New Version" instead of "Preview New Version"