4  Overview

Warning

🚧 This section is being actively worked on. 🚧

In order to participate in this course, you must complete everything in this section and finish with completing the survey at the end. These tasks are meant to provide everyone with the necessary setup and a shared foundation for the course.

Depending on your prior knowledge and skills, these tasks could take between TIME hrs to finish, so we suggest planning some time to complete them. While many of the tasks are mostly readings, they are important in making sure you get the most out of the course.

4.1 Summary of tasks

Here’s a quick overview of the tasks you need to do. Specific details about them are found as you work through the tasks. Most of the time spent on the tasks is on the reading tasks. We include these reading tasks to have you as aware and as well-prepared as we can before the course, so that we have a smoother start and so that you benefit more from the improved learning from the earlier and repeated exposure.

If you haven’t already, go through the course overview section, including the Syllabus, Is this for you?, and Learning design to get an overview of what this course contains and the learning design behind the course material.

After that, please go through the the pre-course tasks designed to establish a shared foundation for the start of the course. This includes:

  1. Read the learning objectives in Section 4.2 for the pre-course tasks (below on this page).
  2. Read about how to read this website in Section 4.3 (below on this page).
  3. Do some reading tasks in Chapter 5.
  4. Install the necessary programs and the right versions of those programs in Chapter 6. As mentioned in the callout block above, depending on your institution, this task can take the longest amount of time because you have to contact your IT to install these packages.
  5. Read about and navigate R and RStudio in Chapter 7.
  6. Install necessary R packages in Chapter 8. This may also require IT approval, so start early.
  7. Read some of the course sections on Git, configure Git on your computer, and create a GitHub account in ?sec-setup-git-and-github as well as run some checks to make sure everything is working. You’ll need to paste this output into the survey later on.
  8. Read through the Code of Conduct in Chapter 9.
  9. Complete the pre-course survey in Chapter 10. This survey is pretty quick, maybe ~10 minutes. There will be some bits from the tasks that you will need to paste into this survey.

4.2 Learning objective

Most of the description of the course is in the syllabus that is found in Chapter 1. While you may have signed up to this course to learn more about R, you should know that conducting reproducible research goes beyond R and RStudio. Which means we will be spending time using other tools that you will use with R so that you can improve the reproducibility of your research. This course is designed to introduce you to doing reproducible research while using R.

In general, these pre-course tasks are meant to help prepare you for the course and make sure everything is setup properly so the first session runs smoothly. While most of these pre-course tasks are meant to prepare you for the course, some of them are also designed for learning purposes to enable you to:

  • Be prepared

4.3 How to read this website

We try to be consistent with the way to present certain information in this website. Specifically, we follow some conventions that you should be aware of:

  • Folder names always end with /, for example data/ means the data folder.
  • File names always end with their file extension, for example content.R means the file is an R file.

Throughout the many times we’ve taught R and statistics courses we get asked a lot of questions. We have a Frequently Asked Questions page for keeping track of some of these questions. Check out this page, maybe your question has already been answered!

Tip

You will be taken through the pre-course tasks in order by clicking the arrow at the bottom of each page ➡️