Rau, Roland wrote:
> Dear R-Users,
>
> given you have been teaching R to students (grad level, mainly social
> science background, no previous programming experience, 80% know SPSS),
> what are your experiences concerning the style of teaching? Do you
> prefer to stand in front of the class like in "normal" lectures and you
> show them slides? Or do you you explain some concept (for example things
> like mydata[order(var1, var2),]) and show it directly on the computer
> via beamer/projector and also the students have to enter it on the
> computers in front of them.
>
> Any experiences you can share are highly appreciated.
I like to teach using a projector and people sitting in front of other
machines beeing able to try out some of the nonsense I am telling.
Of course, they need more exercises than just the few minutes in between
my sentences.
I am always noth using slides and showing the examples in R directly.
For all other stuff, it is the same as with other courses and lectures.
If this is a one-week course, I'd like to propose 1.5 hours course + 1.5
hours exercise in the morning and the same again in the afternoon. If
this is a whole-term course, you may be able to let people do homework,
but always talk about their "results" and show them hoe to do it in a
good fashion.
Unfortunately, for courses with lots of poeple (say 90, for the
first-years' R course I am teaching) it is impossible that people are
sitting in front of a computer for some reasons: not enough machines, no
big rooms, and too much noise caused by both machines and people.
The really important fact from my point of view:
Give people many *exercises* and the *time* to work on these exercises.
Expect that people without any programming experience will be much
slower than you imagine in your worst nightmares. ;-)
Uwe Ligges
> Thanks,
> Roland
>
> +++++
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