With the SILVA part of the exercise, several students were confused about how to open/read the .csv output.
The .csv output from SILVA is tricky for a few reasons - one of which is that it's not comma-separated variable format. It is semicolon-separated. Also, all the data is enclosed in quotes.
Opening this in Excel or in a plain text editor is unhelpful, as headers and data cells are out of alignment. Students are unaware of how to import data like this into Excel (this could be helped with a more comprehensive introduction to Excel for data analysis).
The method we indicated in the material was to drag the header separators for each column so that the taxonomic assignment could be seen directly on the result website. This wasn't clear enough for some students, and this could be enhanced.
With the SILVA part of the exercise, several students were confused about how to open/read the
.csvoutput.The
.csvoutput from SILVA is tricky for a few reasons - one of which is that it's not comma-separated variable format. It is semicolon-separated. Also, all the data is enclosed in quotes.Opening this in Excel or in a plain text editor is unhelpful, as headers and data cells are out of alignment. Students are unaware of how to import data like this into Excel (this could be helped with a more comprehensive introduction to Excel for data analysis).
The method we indicated in the material was to drag the header separators for each column so that the taxonomic assignment could be seen directly on the result website. This wasn't clear enough for some students, and this could be enhanced.