swirldev/swirl_courses

★ 4,545RAudience · dataComplexity · 1/5Setup · easy

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((swirl_courses))
    What it does
      Teach R interactively
      Step-by-step lessons
    Course levels
      Beginner basics
      Intermediate data tools
      Advanced statistics
    Key features
      Console-based learning
      Classroom email tracking
    Audience
      R beginners
      Data students
      Instructors

mindmap root((swirl_courses)) What it does Teach R interactively Step-by-step lessons Course levels Beginner basics Intermediate data tools Advanced statistics Key features Console-based learning Classroom email tracking Audience R beginners Data students Instructors

Click or tap to explore — scroll the page freely

Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Learn R programming interactively from beginner to advanced without leaving the R console.

USE CASE 2

Follow a statistics curriculum on probability, hypothesis testing, and confidence intervals aligned with the Johns Hopkins Data Science Specialization.

USE CASE 3

Teach R in a classroom with automated email notifications when students complete lessons using the R Programming E course.

USE CASE 4

Write your own custom swirl lessons using the included course-authoring curriculum.

Tech stack

Rswirl

Getting it running

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 5min

Requires R and the swirl package, courses are fetched and installed with a single function call like install_course("R Programming").

Free to use for teaching, instructors may not charge students directly for access to the swirl software or course content.

In plain English

This repository holds a collection of interactive courses designed to teach the R programming language. R is a language widely used for data analysis, statistics, and making charts and graphs from data. The courses here are meant to be taken inside the R console itself using a package called swirl, which turns the coding environment into a step-by-step lesson rather than a static reading exercise. The courses are grouped by difficulty. Beginner courses cover the basics of writing R code. Intermediate courses go into data manipulation tools and techniques for cleaning and reshaping data sets. Advanced courses cover statistical inference, including probability, hypothesis testing, and confidence intervals, roughly following the Johns Hopkins Data Science Specialization on Coursera. There is also a course aimed at people who want to write their own swirl lessons. Installation is done from inside R, not from this GitHub page. The simplest path is to install the swirl package, then call one function with the course name, and then start the session. For example, calling install_course("R Programming") fetches and sets up that course automatically. A manual fallback method exists for cases where the automatic install fails, and the repo links to a legacy guide as well. A version of the R Programming course called R Programming E was made for classroom use. It skips the Coursera credential prompts at the end of each lesson and instead sends a completion notification to the instructor by email, which is a workaround for tracking student progress without a full dashboard. Instructors are welcome to use these courses in their classes at no charge. The only restriction is that they should not charge students directly for access to the swirl software or its course content. The project is maintained by the same team behind the swirl package itself.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1

I'm learning R and want to take swirl_courses interactively. Show me how to install swirl and start the R Programming course from inside the R console.

Prompt 2

Using swirl_courses, walk me through installing and starting the Statistical Inference course in R.

Prompt 3

Help me build a custom swirl lesson on data frames using the swirl course-authoring tools from the swirl_courses repo.

Prompt 4

I want to use swirl_courses for a classroom, how do I configure the R Programming E course to send lesson-completion emails to an instructor?

Open on GitHub → Explain another repo

← swirldev on gitmyhub — every repo by this author, as a profile.

Verify against the repo before relying on details.