Ava Hoffman - Ten Simple Rules for Teaching an Introduction to R

Transcript#

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Hi, I'm Ava Hoffman. I'm here today to tell you about Ten Simple Rules for Teaching Intro to R.

There's no shortage of amazing content out there. Some of the creators are maybe here in this room with us right now. But a lot of this material is directed at learners who are really self-motivated and can work through content independently.

We know there's value in synchronous education, whether that's in a classroom or on an online platform like Zoom. Some people just need a little bit more hands-on help when it comes to learning R programming.

But then the question becomes, who's going to teach it? And that might end up being you, whether that's in a traditional classroom or maybe you're doing a workshop for your colleagues. But a lot of people feel unprepared to do this.

And so I'm here today to hopefully alleviate a little bit of the stress when it comes to being a new instructor teaching new R users for the first time. My colleague, Carrie Wright, and I have taught an introduction to R to hundreds of public health professionals, graduate students and undergraduate interns, all of whom are going to lack the computer science background and maybe are a little uncomfortable from the start.

And we've distilled our top 10 takeaways so you can get up and running teaching R quickly. It's kind of like a listicle.

Setting yourself up for success

And with the few minutes I have left, I'm going to go through a couple of nuggets of information, hopefully, to prepare you a little bit. So first, we want to set ourselves up for success.

We like to make it an intensive, minimize those distractions, turn off the Slack notifications. It's good for you and for your students.

Teach as a team. It's great to have a support network with you and your colleague. You could support each other and grow in your teaching journey.

And I want to linger on this rule a little bit, and that is to teach reproducibly using dynamic documents like R Markdown and Quarto . Not only is it going to teach, help your learners learn reproducible practices, but keep the pace with rapid updates in our ecosystem. And not only that, but platforms like GitHub have great project management features like projects and issues. I know I forget pieces of things I want to change immediately and making issues helps me keep track of that.

Keeping it practical

Keep it practical.

I tell my students a lot to prioritize intuition over memorization. The reality is you're going to be able to Google things and look at the documentation.

Make sure you focus on live code and lab time. Get your hands in the code right away and start making mistakes.

Start with data wrangling. Most of our learners statistically who start learning R are not going to be computer scientists, so not a thing we want to bog down in the beginning.

And then again, I want to linger on this one, so end the course or perhaps a workshop with a project. Research shows that applying what you've learned in real life context is going to foster better comprehension, more curiosity and more motivation for the rest of your R learning journey.

Research shows that applying what you've learned in real life context is going to foster better comprehension, more curiosity and more motivation for the rest of your R learning journey.

We've had students cover everything from Pokemon data to art installations and really meaningful public health projects.

Knowing your learners

And finally, know your learners.

So we suggest committing to either Tidyverse or Base R. Learners tend to get a little confused if you mix them up, and we find Tidyverse works really well for our public health audience.

Know the common pitfalls. You're likely to encounter mistakes over and over again, such as, you know, loading particular packages. Students often get caught up on that. And so knowing ahead of time can help you be prepared.

And then the last piece and probably most important bit of advice I can give is to give and get feedback often. Your teaching or your content is never going to be perfect the first time around. You can always make it better.

Your teaching or your content is never going to be perfect the first time around. You can always make it better.

So we typically will survey our learners throughout the course anonymously and try to get a little bit more information on what we can do better, what we might modify and how we can better meet their needs.

And I just want to leave you with this. This is a link to our paper, if you want to read more about the ten simple rules or check out the slides. But if you're new to teaching, good luck. You're going to do great.