Using EdTech applications as an academic, R trainer or training company is no longer a unique selling proposition, but a must-have commodity. In this post, we introduce the new DataCamp course creation tools for academics, trainers and enterprises, and make a call to those who are interested in using these tools for R training and R education. More information via [email protected].Everyone that is involved in academic teaching or professional training is experiencing how a new wave of online education tools is changing the way things are done inside and outside the classroom. Using EdTech is no longer a differentiator, but a must-have.  One must dare to go beyond the standard offering of webinars and the traditional collection of online instruction videos. All these new tools are disrupting the current business models around trainings, as well as the educational and pedagogic models used today.

New Features for R training and R education

For over a year now, DataCamp has been working on building tailored and scalable EdTech tools for R training and R education. We do these developments for our own R courses and tutorials -in 2014 alone we already trained over 42,000 new R enthusiast- and for academics, trainers and companies using R in a narrow or a broad sense. In the past months, we have been working hard on some serious improvements to our course creation tools and today we make these new developments available to the public. You can now:

• Integrate video material and add slides,
• Write better and more complex submission correctness tests (more on that in a follow-up blogpost soon),
• And – upon request- set up private learning environments for your students and clients and track their individual performance. (We’ll make sure to cover the technicalities of these new features in more detail in one of our next posts.)          

Furthermore, we have created a whole new FAQ section that answers questions on the course creation process itself, how to track student and employee performance, ways to use DataCamp for your courses, books and trainings,  our offer for tailored online and live trainings, and much more. Additionally, to help future course creators, we have developed our own course creation style guide based on the style guide published by Hadley Wickham.

For academics, trainers and enterprises

With these new functionalities and tools we want to meet the new needs and challenges of:

• academics that want to complement their academic lectures with new and exciting interactive exercises,
• trainers and training companies that need to adapt their online and live course portfolio to the changing business environment,
• package authors and R enthusiasts that want to create their own online course on their favourite topic or package,
• and (large) enterprises in need of cost-effective, but yet tailored and scalable trainings.

If you are an academic that is interested in using DataCamp, a professional trainer or training company that is ready to integrate EdTech into your course portfolio, or a company in need of high-quality cost-effective R training and R education, contact us at [email protected] or go to our teaching site.