Abstract:

With the rise of the pandemic, educational institutions were in a way forced to put online their resources and services. In a post-COVID era, it is undeniable that online education shows great promise at least to undergraduate and postgraduate education. One approach towards online education is open source software. Opting in for open source offers many advantages such as flexibility and service continuity. In addition, since the educational field is restricted by possible budget limitations, open source is a scalable, future-proof and cost-effective alternative.

This paper focuses on the benefits of an open source approach in undergraduate and postgraduate education. It is exploring the strengths of using web technologies for a higher level approach that unifies end-user and server logic in a simple mark-up language. Consequently opening up the possibility to upload and share fast educational interactive material in a server without having to have explicit knowledge of web full-stack development.

One way of actually incorporating such an approach is through programming language R and Shiny apps. Shiny Apps are web applications developed in R and uploaded to a server called Shiny server. Using R Markdown, with a single markdown various exports can be achieved through the Pandoc project (a universal document converter). Within html documents or as stand alone, interactive web applications written in a unified framework can be directly uploaded to the Shiny server. With an accessible Shiny server, other educators can contribute and share a project, while students need only a browser to receive and interact with educational material. Our research will be concluded by providing an example of a Shiny app that will constitute a part of a course for statistics.

References:
[1] Coppola, C., & Neelley, E. (2004). Open source-opens learning: Why open source makes sense for education.
[2] Krewinkel, A., & Winkler, R. (2017). Formatting Open Science: agilely creating multiple document formats for academic manuscripts with Pandoc Scholar. PeerJ computer science, 3, e112.
[3] Lakhan, S. E., & Jhunjhunwala, K. (2008). Open source software in education. Educause Quarterly, 31(2), 32.
[4] Mailund T. (2019) Why Use Markdown and Pandoc. In: Introducing Markdown and Pandoc. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5149-2_2

Keywords:

Cloud, Open Source, R programming language, Shiny apps.