One of the benefits and challenges of working with R is that there are often several ways to accomplish the same thing. This post is a few years old (so there’s probably even more ways to do it now!), but it details five different methods of creating a choropleth map of US unemployment data.

http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2009/11/choropleth-challenge-result.html

DataCamp generously provides access to their premium courses to educators, and has done so for our use in Geovisualization. You will receive an email with a link to create a DataCamp account (or link your existing account to my course).

As I have discovered this mid-semester, I still have to decide how we are going to use this, but I will definitely be requiring at least the following two DataCamp courses be completed:

• Data Visualization with ggplot2 (Part 1)
• Data Manipulation in R with dplyr

The following courses also look relevant to Geovisualization. Whether or not they are assigned, you should consider looking at them:

• Working with Geospatial Data in R
• Exploratory Data Analysis
• Data Visualization with ggplot2 (Part 2)

There may be others, but I am trying to be judicious.