Feature Suggestion, Your Workspace vs Shared

Quick update for the rstudio.cloud folks on our progress. We've been using .cloud for a 550-person first-year course in statistics, and have up to 450 of the students using the cloud projects every Thursday and Friday.

  • I'm very happy with the current status of things. I'm creating projects, getting copies from the students, dissemination is a breeze
  • the template system for shared workspace is great, and eliminates any need for novices to understand the package ecosystem
  • this is not the case for the Your Workspace workspace

So, as a feature request, perhaps consider allowing the same tagging of a project as a "template" for the Your Workspace workspace. I've had several of the stronger students come in, want to create more projects, but be trapped into a world where they try to create a new project in their Your Workspace workspace, and then nothing they're used to works (because tidyverse and rmarkdown + dependencies aren't there). Also, it might make sense to be able, when creating a copy, to designate the destination? Maybe this is a feature already and I missed it, but allowing students to "Copy Project" and specify shared or Your would be great - it would let them copy templates, for example.

And since the templating system already exists for shared workspaces, it might be straightforward to port it over to the "Your Workspace" environment. Of course, "might" is a strong word ... maybe it's a nightmare! But it would be very useful for us if this were setup, to allow students to mirror the environment they're used to from a classroom shared space into their Your Workspace, so they continue exploring, using, and creating.