How Collaborative Editing feature works

Currently, collaborative editing only works for Admins and Moderators in a space.

One workaround we can offer currently to allow small group collaborative editing is to recommend that you, as the teacher, create a separate space for each collaborating group of students, and make all the students moderators in that space. This currently only works for groups of <=5 students, and includes additional overhead to setup the ‘breakout spaces’, but it would allow some additional functionality for group activities in the classroom as we work to build out more fine-grained control in the system.

As a clarification, you can make the students moderators in the space, provided there are 5 or less students in that space.

You only need to create separate spaces if you have more than 5 students who need to edit simultaneously. Per the guide https://docs.posit.co/cloud/guide/collaborate/#collaborative-editing:

If collaborative editing has been enabled, up to 5 users can simultaneously edit the project. You can see who else is working on a project - and the changes to saved files that any user makes are immediately displayed to the other users.

If collaborative editing has not been enabled, you will take over the other user’s session, and they will see the session disconnected message above.

So all students can be moderators within one space as long as there are <= 5 needing to collaborate per copy of the assignment/project. You can create a space for each group with the copy space command.

We do recognize this limitation is inconvenient and we appreciate your feedback and helping us to improve this beta feature. We’ll be sure to pass any feedback you have to our development team.

Additional information that may be helpful:

Moderators are able to view, edit and manage all content in a space regardless of the project’s access setting. So, if they open a student’s project and make any changes to it, it will impact the student’s work.

https://docs.posit.co/cloud/guide/collaborate/#collaborative-editing

Contributors are not able to collaboratively edit a project. If it is a shared project, once they access it, they get a temporary copy of the original project. They can play with and make edits to the copy, but none of the changes will be reflected in the original. Contributors can only create, edit and manage their own content.

To skip the temporary copy step, you can designate a shared project as an assignment. When a Contributor accesses an assignment, they get their own permanent copy immediately.

https://docs.posit.co/cloud/guide/collaborate/#access-to-projects-outputs-in-a-shared-space

Making students moderators in one of your spaces will not incur any immediate costs to your account. You will be responsible for additional usage generated by these spaces if your plan has usage limits.

It is important to clarify that if you set up collaborative spaces and make students Moderators in those collaboration spaces, they will be able to collaboratively edit projects. Although the setup can be tedious, depending on the number of groups/students, it should work, and as the account owner, you will have access to all space and content within those spaces. We recognize this is a bit tedious and not an ideal situation, but we hope it will allow you to proceed.

Our plans do not include allowing collaborative editing for all roles. However, the temporary space approach we described, where teachers assign students the role of Moderator, provides students with the ideal workaround for collaboration on editing. It is our sincerest apologies that we were unable to provide better information and we greatly appreciate your comments.

If you have any further questions or need assistance, please open a support ticket.