Making teaching materials with Quarto

useR 2025

Elijah Meyer & Maria Tackett

Outline

  • Why use Quarto to make teaching materials?

  • What teaching materials can I create using Quarto?

  • How do I get started?

Why use Quarto to make teaching materials?

Benefits for instructor

  • Reproducible course materials that are easier to update

  • Integrate narrative, executable R code, images, and interactive elements

  • Easily share course materials with students and more broadly

  • Regularly use the same technology as your students

Benefits for students

  • Navigation menu on all documents to easily to find content

  • Search capabilities on website to more easily find content by topic

  • Option to export PDF of slides

  • Ability to read course materials on multiple devices

What teaching materials can I create using Quarto?

Teaching materials in Quarto

Course websites

Slides

Teaching materials in Quarto

Long-form notes

Assignment instructions

Slides

Slide menu

  • Slide navigation

  • Print to PDF

  • Speaker view

  • Annotation

  • Chalkboard

Slide with code + output

Published slide

Source code

Slide with mathematical notation

Published slide

Source code

Websites

Example course website

Source: Regression Analysis: Theory and Application taught by Maria Tackett

Example website file structure

Interactive documents with webR

“Run R code in the browser without the need for an R server to execute the code”

YAML

---
title: "webR document"
format: html
filters:
  - webr
webr:
  packages: ['dplyr', 'ggplot2']
---

Executable code chunk

{webr-r}
mpg |>
  count(manufacturer, _____)

How do I get started?

Getting started: slides + documents

---
title: "Lecture 01"
subtitle: "Statistics 101"
author: "Instructor"
date: "August 7, 2023"
format: revealjs
---

Tip

Easily produce multiple types of documents by changing the format in the YAML.

---
title: "Lecture 01"
subtitle: "Statistics 101"
author: "Instructor"
date: "August 7, 2023"
date-format: long
footer: "URL to course website"
format: 
  revealjs:
    theme: slides.scss
    transition: fade
    slide-number: false
    incremental: false 
    chalkboard: 
    code-link: true
editor: visual
execute: 
  eval: true
  echo: true
---

Getting started: websites

  • Make a website repo on GitHub

  • Clone the repo and start a new RStudio project

  • Run the following code in the Terminal

    quarto create-project --type website

You will see the standard files for a new website in the Files pane. See Creating a Website on quarto.org for more information.

Publishing materials

Run the following code in the Terminal

GitHub pages

quarto publish gh-pages

Quarto pub

quarto publish quarto-pub

Netlify

quarto publish netlify


See Publishing Basics on quarto.org for more information and publishing options.

Course websites created with Quarto

Learn more!

Wrap up

Recap

  • Build excitement about R on the first day

  • webR for interactive lectures

  • Computing proficiency as a course learning objective

  • Pedagogy of teaching computing in statistics and data science courses

  • Reproducibility using Quarto and GitHub

  • Creating and distributing assignments with GitHub

  • Making teaching materials with Quarto

Lessons learned

  • It is worth it!

    • There are resources. Here are a few.
    • The time investment pays off for your and your students

  • Practice by using the same workflow as your students.

  • Technology is choose your own adventure. Consider your time, resources, and student population.

  • Get connected to a community.

  • You (and your students) can do this!

Q&A / Discussion