4  Overview

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 1 to 4 hours 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 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 the Studieordning.
  2. Read about how to read this website in Section 4.2 (below on this page).
  3. Do some reading tasks in Chapter 5.
  4. Install or update the necessary programs in Chapter 6. Depending on your technical skills, this task can take the longest amount of time.
  5. Read about and navigate R and RStudio in Chapter 7.
  6. Install necessary R packages in Chapter 8. This may be a bit technical for you, so start early.
  7. Read through the Code of Conduct in Chapter 9.
  8. 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.

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

4.2 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 ➡️