swirl courses

This is a collection of interactive courses for use with the swirl R package. You'll find instructions for installing courses further down on this page. Some courses are still in development and we'd love to hear any suggestions you have as you work through them.

For more information regarding swirl, visit swirlstats.com or the swirl GitHub repository. If you'd like to write your own interactive content, please visit the Instructors page of our website.

Here are our current offerings, organized by level of difficulty:

Beginner

R Programming
Data Analysis
Mathematical Biostatistics Boot Camp
Open Intro

Intermediate

Regression Models

Advanced

Coming soon!

Since our users come from a variety backgrounds, it's very hard to label material as Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced. If you find something that is labelled Beginner to be challenging, please don't be discouraged. The first step of learning anything is to acknowledge that you are capable of understanding it. True understanding will come with time and practice.

Install and run a course automatically from swirl

This is the preferred method of installing courses. It automates the process by allowing you to do everything right from the R console.

Make sure you have a recent version version of swirl:

install.packages("swirl")

Enter the following from the R console, substituting the name of the course that you wish to install:

library(swirl)
install_from_swirl("Course Name Here")
swirl()

For example, install_from_swirl("R Programming") will install the R Programming course. Please note that course names are case sensitive!

If that doesn't work for you...

Install and run a course manually

If the automatic course installation method outlined above does not work for you, then there's a simple alternative.

Click on the Download ZIP button on the righthand side of this page.
Enter the following from the R console, substituting the correct file path to your downloaded file and the name of your desired course:

library(swirl)
install_course_zip("path/to/file/here/swirl_courses-master.zip", multi=TRUE, 
                   which_course="Course Name Here")
swirl()

For example, if you download the zip file to ~/Downloads/swirl_courses-master.zip, then the following command will install the R Programming course.

install_course_zip("~/Downloads/swirl_courses-master.zip", multi=TRUE, which_course="R Programming")

Please note that course names are case sensitive!

Although we recommend you install one course at a time, if you omit the which_course argument, then all available courses from this repository will be installed:

install_course_zip("~/Downloads/swirl_courses-master.zip", multi=TRUE)