Teachers' perception of Jupyter and R Shiny as digital tools for open education and science

TL;DR

This study explores physics teachers' perceptions of Jupyter and R Shiny as open-source digital tools in education, highlighting their acceptance, challenges, and potential for enhancing learning and data literacy.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into teachers' perceptions and readiness to adopt Jupyter and R Shiny, emphasizing the need for targeted training and highlighting their educational benefits.

Findings

In-service teachers are less prepared for Jupyter but accept R Shiny for feedback.

Young teachers and PER students can develop digital skills with Jupyter.

Jupyter has potential to improve learning and data literacy in education.

Abstract

During the last ten years advances in open-source digital technology, used especially by data science, led to very accessible ways how to obtain, store, process, analyze or share data in almost every human activity. Data science tools bring not only transparency, accessibility, and reproducibility in open science, but also give benefits in open education as learning tools for improving effectiveness of instruction. Together with our pedagogical introduction and review of Jupyter as an interactive multimedia learning tool, we present our three-years long research in the framework of a complex mixed-methods approach which examines physics teachers' perception of Jupyter technology in three groups: Ph.D. candidates in physics education research (PER) ($N = 9$), pre-service physics teachers ($N = 33$) and in-service physics teachers ($N = 40$). Despite the fact that open-source Jupyter notebooks are natural and easy as email or web, the results suggest that in-service teachers are not prepared for Jupyter technology and open analysis, but positively accept open education data presented via another open-source data science tool, R Shiny interactive web application, as an important form of immediate feedback and learning about the quality of their instruction. Simultaneously our instruction results in the frame of the Flipped Learning also indicate that young beginning PER researchers and pre-service physics teachers can master key digital skills to work with Jupyter technology appreciating its big impact on their learning, data and statistical literacy or professional development. All results support the ongoing worldwide effort to implement Jupyter in traditional education as a promising free open-source interactive learning tool to foster learning process, especially for the upcoming young generation.