OTTR - Website and Online Course Tools

OTTR (Open-source Tools for Training Resources ) is a set of tools and templates to help you make websites, online courses, and dashboards more easily (and for free)!

OTTR at a Glance by ITN

Benefits for all OTTR options:

  • No software installations needed
  • Automatically preview content on GitHub before you publish
  • Automatically check spelling (and customize your dictionary!)
  • Automatically and periodically check for broken links
  • Easily customize branding
  • Easily include code (and avoid version difference issues using Docker containers)

OTTR helps build github based websites with less hassle. Catch potential mistakes before they go live

Benefits for specific uses:

  • Websites can be created using quarto or bookdown
  • Courses can be easily formatted for learning platforms like coursera and Leanpub (only edit once and it gets propagated to all locations - making for easy updates!)
  • Metrics can be gathered from a variety of sources for dashboards


(*Note that you will need to establish a publishing contract with coursera if you want to publish there)

Check out this short video about OTTR:

How to use OTTR:

  1. Edit and write websites and courses in R Markdown files or Quarto
  2. Use GitHub to host your content, we will walk you through how!
  3. Let the GitHub actions in our tools do all the checks and rendering so you don’t have too
  4. Update your content as needed based on the errors OTTR finds and the preview
  5. Publish your websites and courses!

How to Cite OTTR:

Please cite our OTTR manuscript here!πŸ“πŸ‘€

Click here for the BibTeX formatted citation 
@article{ottr,
  author = {Candace Savonen, Carrie Wright, Ava M. Hoffman, John Muschelli, Katherine Cox, Frederick J. Tan and Jeffrey T. Leek},
  title = {Open-source Tools for Training Resources – OTTR},
  journal = {Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education},
  volume = {31},
  number = {1},
  pages = {57-65},
  year = {2023},
  publisher = {Taylor & Francis},
  doi = {10.1080/26939169.2022.2118646},
  URL = {https://doi.org/10.1080/26939169.2022.2118646},
  eprint = {https://doi.org/10.1080/26939169.2022.2118646}
}