Please note that this guide is a work in progress - we will be developing it over the next few months.
The Open Case Studies project, developed at the Johns Hopkins Data Science Lab, is an education platform that provides self-contained, multimodal, peer-reviewed, and open-source guides for real-world examples for active experiences of complete data analyses.
Case study guides can be used 1) in the classroom (either onsite or online) by engaging students to actively participate in a hands-on problem-solving experience, and 2) outside of the classroom by providing an archive of stand-alone examples of best practices.
To help guide educators on how to most effectively use the Open Case Studies (either in or outside of the classroom), this guide documents examples of how to use the case studies, various entry points to using the case studies (including an R package to enable modular use of the case studies), how to modify and adapt components of the case studies for the classroom, and how to contribute new case studies.
- ch1 - Intro to open case studies
This chapter describes the philosophy and motivation behind the open case studies project, as well as the anatomy of an individual open case study.
- ch2 - Open case studies infrastructure
This chapter describes the infrastructure for the project as a whole and the case study workflow in terms of how to access data and other materials, including information about our website, which include a case study search tool, a package to access data within R called OCSdata, and our repositories on GitHub.
- ch3 - Use of open case studies
This chapter provides information and examples on different ways to use open case studies in the classroom, such as how to use case studies in a modular way by only using specific case study sections and guidance about which case studies to focus on for different types of students including examples of how to appropriately tailor homework assignments to expand beyond the case studies as assignemtns for students.
- ch4 - Modifying case studies
This chapter demonstrates the technical aspects involved with using case studies in a modular way and how to create specific alterations
- ch5 - Contribution guidelines
This chapter will describe how to join the community and publish new case studies. It will provide guidance about how to build new case studies that follow the open case studies principles.
This course was created from this GitHub template.
You can see the rendered course material here: https://www.opencasestudies.org/OCS_Guide/
If you are encountering any problems with this course, please file a GitHub issue or contact us at opencasestudies at gmail.com
All materials in this course are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License unless noted otherwise.