14.2 Tutorial types

There are two main types of tutorial documents:

1. Tutorials that are mostly narrative and/or video content, and also include some runnable code chunks. These documents are very similar to package vignettes in that their principal goal is communicating concepts. The interactive tutorial features are then used to allow further experimentation by the reader.

2. Tutorials that provide a structured learning experience with multiple exercises, quiz questions, and tailored feedback.

The first type of tutorial is much easier to author while still being very useful. These documents will typically add exercise = TRUE to selected code chunks, and also set exercise.eval = TRUE so the chunk output is visible by default. The reader can simply look at the R code and move on, or play with it to reinforce their understanding.

The second type of tutorial provides much richer feedback and assessment, but also requires considerably more effort to author. If you are primarily interested in this sort of tutorial, there are many features in learnr to support it, including exercise hints and solutions, automated exercise checkers, and multiple choice quizzes with custom feedback.

The most straightforward path is to start with the first type of tutorial (executable chunks with pre-evaluated output), and then move into more sophisticated assessment and feedback over time.