Chris, I introduced R to our DrPH students like 3 or 4 years ago. All of our DrPH students come from MD background with very little or no programming background. I started teaching them with base R and gradually increase the use 'tidyverse' packages. I can't help but noticing that 'tidyverse' fastens the learning process especially for data wrangling (using dplyr) and exploratory data analysis (using ggplot2). The help documents (vignettes) for tidyverse are very useful, the books are available (R graphics Cookbook, R for Data Science) and the websites (ggplot2 website, Cookbook for R websites) are excellent. I also teach them Rmarkdown which they are using very happily to create pdf and MS Word (especially) for their assignments. So as for now, tidyverse constitutes for almost 95% of my teaching and my workshop when it comes to data wrangling and data exploration.
Regards, Kamarul ------------------------------------- Kamarul Imran Musa MD, MCommunityMed, PhD (Statistics & Epidemiology) Associate Professor (Epidemiology & Biostatistics) and Public Health Medicine Specialist, Department of Community Medicine, School of Medical Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 16150 Kbg Kerian Kelantan Malaysia Tel +6097676621 Malaysian Medical Council Registration: 34450 ResearcherID: http://www.researcherid.com/rid/N-3198-2015 Google-scholar: 'Kamarul Imran Musa' at https://goo.gl/D3o3y6 ORCID ID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3708-0628 ScopusID: 57194536466 On Tue, Jul 3, 2018 at 4:30 AM Christopher W. Ryan <[email protected]> wrote: > > I'll be teaching intro epidemiology in a new MPH program, starting this > fall. Weekly sessions, each 3 hours long. Expecting 12-20 students. I > plan to try to make it fairly interactive, with a "computer lab" as part > of almost every class session. Using R. I'll do an initial "needs > assessment" prior to or on first day of class; for now I assume none of > the students are at all familiar with R. My first thought was to limit > my efforts to base R, rather than try to use any installable packages. > Any opinions about that? I specifically wonder whether Hadley Wickham's > tidyverse way of doing things is become so commonplace (and rightly so!) > that I should introduce this. It certainly makes data wrangling much > easier, and that is a lot of what epidemiologists do, since we are so > often given existing data that were not recorded with future analyses in > mind. > > Thoughts on any of the above? Thanks. > > --Chris Ryan, MD, MS > Binghamton University, > SUNY Upstate Medical University, > and > Broome County Health Department, NY, US > > _______________________________________________ > [email protected] mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-teaching _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-teaching
