This is not a direct answer to your question, so I hope I'm not hijacking the thread, but we have summarized the getting-started solutions we use at Duke at https://peerj.com/preprints/3181/. It's a different approach, which requires no installation on the student's part but resources on the university side.
As a note, as we mention in the paper, students eventually do learn how to install R and RStudio locally, but the goal is to move that to later in the semester and not make it be a first day bottleneck.