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rgoogleclassroom

rgoogleclassroom is a Google API wrapper that allows you to use Google Classroom and Google Forms from the coziness and comfort of R.

You can read the rgoogleclassroom package documentation here.

To use this package you need to have a Google Classroom account. Go here to get that: https://edu.google.com/workspace-for-education/classroom/

Installation

You can install this package from CRAN or the development version from GitHub with:

# Install from CRAN
install.packages("rgoogleclassroom")

# or the development version from GitHub
if (!("remotes" %in% installed.packages())) {
  install.packages("remotes")
}
remotes::install_github("datatrail-jhu/rgoogleclassroom")

Usage

To start, you need to authorize() the package to access your files. Select all the scopes you feel comfortable sharing. Note that you need to select certain scopes for certain functions to work.

Basics

There are different objects in the Google API:

Most of these objects have functions that do the following:

  • get_<object>_list()
  • create_<object>()
  • get_<object>_properties()

For example:

  • get_course_list(owner_id) retrieves a list of courses for a particular owner id.
  • create_course() creates a course
  • get_course_properties(course_id) retrieves the properties of a course given its id.

These can be built together to be pretty nifty.

Example workflow

Run the function to authorize the app to use your Google account.

Retrieve whatever your owner id for Google Classroom is.

owner_id <- get_owner_id()

Now you can retrieve a list of courses that are associated with your owner id.

course_df <- get_course_list(owner_id)

For the following examples, we will need to use

# Create a course
new_course <- create_course(owner_id$id, name = "New course")

Managing materials

We can create new material for the students:

# Create a course we will use for this test
owner_id <- get_owner_id()
new_course <- create_course(owner_id$id, name = "New course")

# Create material at this course
new_material <- create_material(course_id = new_course$id,
                                title = "New material")

# Retrieve the material info
materials_info <- get_materials_properties(course_id = new_course$id,
                                           materials_id = new_material$id)

Retrieve the list of all the materials for the course:

materials_list <- get_materials_list(course_id = new_course$id)

Managing courseworks

We can manage courseworks!

# Create a new coursework
new_coursework <- create_coursework(course_id = new_course$id,
                                    title = "New coursework",
                                    due_date = lubridate::today() + lubridate::hours(24))

# Get coursework properties
course_work_info <- get_coursework_properties(course_id = new_course$id, coursework_id = new_coursework$id)

# Retrieve all the courseworks for this course
coursework_list <- get_coursework_list(course_id = new_course$id)

Make a quiz

We can build a quiz like this:

course_id <- get_course_list()$courses$id[1]

quiz_form_id <- create_quiz(
  course_id = course_id,
  quiz_title = "new quiz2",
  quiz_description = "This is a great quiz",
  due_date = "2025-12-1")

We can create a new multiple choice question in the quiz we just made by using these steps:

create_multiple_choice_question(
  form_id = quiz_form_id$form_info$formId,
  question = "What answer do you want?",
  choice_vector = c("A", "B", "C", "D"),
  correct_answer = 3,
  shuffle_opt = TRUE
)

Delete or archive courses 

# Clean up this test course
archive_course(new_course$id)
delete_course(new_course$id)