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Helping your students with craptops

 I teach with JASP. 

Compared to, say, SPSS, JASP doesn't drain my computer of its processing abilities. But it takes more than a Chromebook to run. And I know that many of my Psych Stats colleagues are teaching with SPSS, which takes way more than a Chromebook to run. 

This is troublesome because some of our students have Chromebooks. Or second-hand laptops or very inexpensive laptops that fit their budget and run Word just fine but leave some of our students at a disadvantage regarding their ability to succeed in classes that require more than Word. I bet many of these students are financially responsible for themselves and operating on a limited budget. So let's help those students.

I learned about a workaround for this problem from one of the ITS employees at Gannon University. A workaround that may be obvious to some of you but I never knew about. It helped one of my students who had a crap top AND (at the time) a concussion, and she was struggling to keep up with work when she could only be on her laptop for brief periods.

I'm going to explain this as well as I can, and probably not using the correct technical terms:

Essentially, GU folks can use their laptop/PC to connect with the mirrored, standard desktop configuration GU has in its computer labs. Then, GU folks can use GU computer from home, controlling it with their sub-par laptop keyboard and mouse. AND...here at GU, you don't need to connect with a VPN or anything. You just connect with Gannon, one less layer to work through. 

Here, it is referred to as a Virtual Lab. I do not know what it is called at your Uni. But I expect that your Uni has this capacity. This advice also assumes that your campus ITS has access to the software you use.

Anyway, this workaround will probably help at least one of your students if you can figure this out with your ITS and include it in your First Day of Class lecture. 


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  1. James BangSeptember 13, 2022 at 11:41 AM

    If I remember correctly JASP is basically a point-and-click for R. Jamovi has similar features, but I don't know how each compares on memory/processor usage. RStudio came out with a cloud version that runs the same as R, but I don't see much advantage to this option since RStudio already runs pretty well on my craptop.

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