Dear all,
I am teaching R using R Studio for several years now. Every year I suffer from the same problem. The IT personnel in my academic organization installs R and R studio in a few classrooms, and then in the middle of the year R version changes, and sometimes some packages stop working. For example, once R 3.6.0 came out, the tree package for decision trees stopped working on previous R versions which I had installed.
PC's in the classroom are locked for security reasons, only IT personnel can install software and they do it once a year at most, so updating R during the academic year is not feasible, and I end up with an R version that I can't properly work with. For example, last year I ended up with R 3.5.2 and packages such as tree that cannot be installed.
I wanted your advise, what is the best way to teach R in a classroom, without the need to constantly updating R and it's packages ? Updating R every year frustrates my IT team.
If we assume that I cannot install every possible package in advance and then just lock the PC (you always want to add more), and assume that some packages will change with the R version, I currently need to keep updating R or give up on some material, which doesn't make sense, either way.
I did some reading and I am thinking that maybe RStudio cloud is what I need. Is this the best tool, is there another option ?
Thank you in advance !