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Transcript#
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As educators, we want our students to focus on learning, not troubleshooting package installations. RStudio Cloud gives us the ability to install all of the packages we'd like to use for a course or workshop using a base project. This means that all of the packages we need are pre-installed in all of the projects within our shared workspace. Let me show you how that works.
Creating a base project
From within our workspace, we'll click on New Project. This will deploy a new RStudio project for us. Once we have our project, we can install all of the packages we'd like to use for our course. You can either create an R script with all of the package installations, or complete the installations via the console.
One benefit to installing packages via the console is that it prevents a bit of confusion for your learners. This is because any R scripts or files that you create in your base project will be available to all of the learners within your workspace. Therefore, it's possible that learners may run the package installation script, thinking that this is a necessary step in the process.
One benefit to installing packages via the console is that it prevents a bit of confusion for your learners. This is because any R scripts or files that you create in your base project will be available to all of the learners within your workspace. Therefore, it's possible that learners may run the package installation script, thinking that this is a necessary step in the process.
We can name our project anything that we'd like, and for this example, we'll name it Base by clicking on Untitled Project and typing in Base. Before we can set this as the default for our workspace, we need to make it accessible to all of our learners by clicking on the Settings wheel, then clicking on the Access tab, and from the Who can view this project drop-down, choosing the Everyone option.
Assigning the base project to the workspace
Once our project has been created and made accessible to everyone in the workspace, we can move out of the project and back to the workspace by clicking on the workspace name in the top menu. From the workspace, we'll click on the Settings wheel in the top right, and from the Base RStudio Project drop-down menu, choosing our base project.
This now sets up all of our learners with the packages we've installed, but that's not all. We can also create a new base project at any time with additional package installations. Because changes to the base project are not retroactive, any previous installations will be carried forward along with the updated installations established when we create and assign a new base project.
