StefanoRapisarda
commented
1 year ago -
General comments on my first R course:
- The selection by row/columns in dataframes could be much more clearer using some sort of visual help, for example a slide with the dataframe in table form and some transition highlighting the selected row/column;
- It would be nice having a list of about 5 suggested resources, both books and digital (other courses or websites where you can practice basic R commands). Each resource should have a small description and an indication of the corresponding programming level (absolute beginner, beginner, etc…). As the workshop philosophy is basically “learn by yourself”, I think this would be particularly appropriate;
- It would be nice if in the status chart participants could also specify their level of education, their subject, their motivation for joining the course, and their previous knowledge of R/programming, just to have some data to improve the course in the future (and maybe to make some reports). Unless, of course, we do not send a survey;
- As an extra video (not necessarily related to exercises), a speaker could spend a couple of words on “objects”, as everything is an object in R, and about how every object has attributes and methods;
- It seems there is a lot of request for statistical analysis. As the course is only on the basics, shall we refer to some learning tool specific for doing statistics in R? Shall we mention packages/basic functions/cheat sheets about statistics so that they can play with their own data?
- It would be nice to have a “Python and R session” where characteristics of the two are compared, as some people asked or mentioned python as well in the course;
- Maybe we should stress (even) more the connection with the programming cafe, a place where they can work on more complex and specific problems (still in R);
- We should discuss at a more general level the structure of the course. Now it covers the basics (real basics basics) and some useful steps for data analysis (data loading and filtering), but perhaps we could go for doing something more complex or dividing the course into a prep. and pro session;
- We may consider to leave some more space for the participants. At the moment the only time they interact with us is for asking questions, but we may want to dedicate some time to hear their opinions on the coding experience. Is it everything clear? What was the most difficult task? Sharing opinions with the group;
- In the second part of the course we show how to load a database and to visualise data, perhaps we can add a session about running basic statistics shortening the filtering part, I think this will make this second part more consistent;
- To create a stronger link with the first part, we could arrange a way to perform operations using all the tools introduced in the previous session, now everything is mainly done with the "black boxes " of tidyverse;
- We definitively need an anonymous survey for the course;
- [2nd wave] It would be nice having diagrams of what is it going on in each exercise. There were people that never programmed who lost the big picture and struggled to find the logic of what they were doing in the second session;
- [2nd wave] In the afternoon session, when multiple filters are applied to the same data set, it would be nice to encourage the students to compare the different outputs (so far the outputs are overwritten on the same variable) and, in this way, being more aware of what R functions are doing to data.
DorienHuijser
If you have any general feedback about the workshop that isn't specific to the Base R &
tidyversecontent, you can leave it here :)