Writing your syllabus

{iheiddown} is not only a tool for students to write their thesis in. It can also be of use for teaching activities at IHEID as it harbors a great looking template for course syllabi. This short article will walk you through the workflow of writing your very own syllabus in R.

Installation

The installation process is the same than for the thesis template. You’ll need the following software:

Install R and R-Studio
Install a LATEX distribution:
Install {iheiddown} by typing the following command install.packages("iheiddown") in the R-Studio console.

Note: typing remotes::install_github("jhollway/iheiddown") will provide you with the latest version from GitHub.

Create your first syllabus

Creating your first syllabus is easy! Let’s look at how it is done. Before we begin, we have to create a new R project by clicking on the file tab in the top of the RStudio window and following the instructions of the prompt that appears. Now that we have created an R project for our presentation, we can open a new R-Markdown file. To do this click on the “plus file” logo in the top left corner and then on “R-Markdown”.

Step 1: Open a project

After you have done this, a little pop-up helper will appear. The first thing we will do is to select the {iheiddown} template for our presentation. To do so, click on the “From Template” option on the left and select the “Syllabus {iheiddown}” template. Now give your file a name and click on “OK”.

Step 2: Select a template

Congrats! You just created your first syllabus! We can actually already render our syllabus. This is done by simply clicking the “knit button” while viewing the MySyllabus.Rmd pane. Et voilà! You have now successfully generated your first syllabus with R.

Take a moment to read through the generated syllabus to get acquainted with the {R-markdown} syntax and to get a feel of the possibilities of the {iheiddown} theme.

Edit your syllabus

This section will focus on giving you an overview of the workflow of creating your syllabus with the {iheiddown} package.

Set YAML options

The general options are set in the YAML header. You can define the contact information of the instructor and the teaching assistant as well as give a general course description or set evaluation policies.

You can also set bibliographic options such as the .bib file you want to draw your references from (references.bib by default) and the style of the bibliographic entries by altering the .csl file.

Setting the start-date of your course

The second step is to set the correct start date of your course in the main MySyllabus.Rmd file. This is done simply by editing the startdate variable in the first code chunk.

Editing your course description

The third and last step is to edit the main body of the syllabus. To do this, simply write the title of each week’s session, a description if necessary and add citations of the weeks material with the id of the reference in the bib file preceded by “@” e.g. @Darwin1958.