All Times EDT
Keywords: statistics, education, R, Python, SQL, data science, open source, REDCap, Arcus Learning Exchange, ALEx, shiny, learnr
The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) needs continuous statistics and data science education in R, Python, and SQL for its researchers in many medical and informatics areas of specialization. Learners prefer to focus on their projects and learn at their own pace. CHOP’s Arcus Learning Exchange (ALEx) enables individualized curricula and data collection. Learners set goals and receive individualized curricula based on their goals; we collect and analyze data on their progress and produce new content. Individualized curricula are hard to scale by hand. In ALEx, instructor-learners interact with a shiny app and a series of REDCap instruments to design and use curricula. REDCap does not just collect data--it also provides a service: an individualized curriculum for each learner. Each curriculum links to online interactive lessons made with a forked version of R’s learnr package that allows interactive Python, SQL, and Bash as well as R. CHOP experts from across the hospital donate peer reviewed lessons (an open source education model) which we make interactive and publish through ALEx. Our e-poster is highly interactive: Anyone can create a curriculum while attending the conference and continue to use ALEx after the conference to make more learning plans for themselves or others, to learn, or to teach, as it is now fully open source.