Can multiple users open the same project and work on it together at the same time?

RStudio Cloud
#1

Hi,

I am a Teaching Assistant for a statistics course and we would like to use RStudio Cloud for some ML problems. We have 24 students who are distributed into 8 groups. What we want is to create a project for each group in RSturio Cloud, and let them work on the project at the same time. We tried it but, once the second student opens the project the first one is working on, first student is disconnected from the session and receives a "R Session Disconnected" message with below explanation: "This browser was disconnected from R session because another browser connected (only one browser at a time may be connected to an Rstudio Session)."

This is not what we want. We want them to work on the same project at the same time, and one can see what the others are doing (like a google doc) simultaneously. In fact, we thought that it would be great if we can see how much (in percentage maybe) each student has contributed in the project? Can you please give me some information about it? Is it possible for them to open a project and work on it at the same time? Or is this something you are working on?

Best,
Ugur

#2

Hi there,

In a Word doc (or similar) the text is static and does not need to be run or compiled. However, if multiple people edit a code file at the same time this would cause a lot of issues when someone tries to run a piece of code while others are making changes etc. This would very quickly break the environment.

A better solution is to let your students learn how to work with Git. Here, each can work on their own part of the code, they can push and merge when changes are made, and you have a perfect track record of who did which part.

Of course this is a learning curve as you'd have to spend time teaching them how to use Git / GitHub, but this is a skill well worth the effort I personally feel...

Good luck with the TA-ing
PJ

#3

Hi Ugur,

This is something we're actively working on (the ability for multiple students or instructors to collaborate simultaneously within the same project). Stay tuned for some news on this in the not too distant future.

Best,
-Andy

1 Like
#4

Hi,

We've updated our "Whats-New" page with details on the "Collaborative Editing" feature, which is now in beta. You can read more about how it works, and learn how to activate it for your account over here: RStudio Cloud.

-Andy

1 Like
#5

@andy_kipp : Does this mean you can actually edit and run code in the same file with multiple users? How did you manage to not breaking the environment when some people are editing code whilst others are running (parts of) it? If you have a blog or something with more details I'd be interested to learn more about it, as this sounds cool!

Kind regards,
PJ

1 Like
#6

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