An R/Quarto tutorial for writing open educational materials

Dr James Bartlett
University of Glasgow
@bartlettje.bsky.social
ESPLAT 2025 Münster 🇩🇪

Preparation steps

  • R/RStudio downloaded to your laptop ✔️
    • At least RStudio v2022.07 or later
  • A github account if you do not have one already ✔️
    • Consider applying for an education account!
  • Download github desktop to access git and a graphical user interface (GUI) ✔️

Why open educational materials?

  • Although credit/incentives are not always optimal, open materials/tutorials benefit science (PsyTeachR Team, 2022).
  • Academics need to work on self-branding to build your profile and reputation (Dijkstra, 2022).

Key terminology

Quarto

  • Quarto = scientific and technical publishing system to combine text and code.
    • Render = generate a new file that combines text, code, and output.

github

  • github = a developer platform for managing and sharing code.
    • git = a version control system to track code/files.
    • Repository = a folder containing a saved version of your code.
    • Pull = retrieve the current version of code in a repository.
    • Commit = save any current changes to code.
    • Push = upload your changes to your repository.

Quarto workflow

Dissemination workflow