Interactive Data Dashboard Development with R Shiny
Earners of this badge have completed a hands-on workshop introducing interactive data dashboard development with R Shiny. Working with real Chesapeake Bay water quality monitoring data, watershed boundaries, and NLCD land cover imagery for the Baltimore region, participants learned to read and navigate Shiny application code, understand Shiny's reactive programming model, and interact with a fully working multi-panel geospatial dashboard. In the final session, participants used an LLM coding assistant to extend the provided app or build a new dashboard from their own dataset, gaining practical experience in AI-assisted R development.
About this Credential
Learning Objectives
- Compare dashboard frameworks and deployment options, and select the appropriate tool and sharing paradigm for a given scientific communication goal.
- Explain the two-part Shiny architecture (UI and server) and the role of inputId/outputId wiring in connecting them.
- Distinguish between the three reactive building blocks — reactive(), observeEvent(), and render*() — and trace reactive chains through application code.
- Build an interactive Leaflet map with marker coloring, polygon layers, raster overlays, and click-event handling using leafletProxy() for efficient updates.
- Create linked interactive visualizations — time series charts, bar charts, and data tables — that respond to map interactions and input widget changes.
- Use an LLM coding assistant to extend a working Shiny app with new features or adapt it to a new dataset, using simulated data as a scaffold when real data is not yet available.
- Deploy a Shiny app for sharing using ngrok tunneling, shinyapps.io cloud hosting, or Shinylive for serverless browser-based delivery.
- Copy the specific credential link for your earned record from your My Credentials page.
- In LinkedIn, choose Add profile section > Licenses & Certifications.
- Use this badge title as the certification name and “University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES)” as the issuing organization.
- Paste your unique credential link into “Credential URL”.