Introduction The demand for data science skills across disciplines has led to massive growth of data-related programs in universities, standalone courses, and other learning materials 1. The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement has propelled data science forward by improving the quality, depth, and availability of free materials 4. ...our course “Introduction to R for Public Health Researchers” (Fig 1) 12 takes place during the Johns Hopkins University Summer and Winter Institutes, over 9 days of 3 hour sessions each. A teaching team provides a broader range of skills, knowledge, and personalities when going over materials. In the age of code-ready large language models like ChatGPT, it is more essential to teach how to interpret, test, and debug, rather than recall specific functions.