Econometrics Lecture Slides on GitHub

rstats
markdown
github
teaching
econometrics
Published

September 8, 2018

This semester, I am posting my lecture slides for my Econometrics class on GitHub. While I usually post my lecture slides for my courses on my website or link to my Dropbox, those are the final PDF documents. On GitHub, I am posting both the final PDFs as well as the source .rmd files. I am primarily doing this for my econometrics students, who will be learning R and R Markdown for their assignments (which is how I write my slides), but this is also open to anyone.

This brings two benefits. First, it provides an example of how to use R Markdown and the benefits of writing plain-text files to convert into PDFs, html and other outputs (more on that in later posts). Second, it is also an example of using GitHub as a version control system for maintaining backups, a platform for collaboration, and exposure to industry tools of the software trade.

Over the summer, I also converted to writing my research papers in R Markdown and managing them on GitHub (and the same with this website). I have also attempted to begin collaborating with some of my coauthors via GitHub. They are presently in private repositories to keep research private until it is ready for publication, but I may consider making more public as examples.

I have updated the Readme file on GitHub to provide more information for how to view, download, and read the .rmd source files used to generate the slides. In future posts, I will discuss more about version control with GitHub, writing with R Markdown, and managing workflow with these tools.