[R-sig-teaching] R for introductory epidemiology for MPH students--base or with a package or two?

[K Imran M]

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 <cryan using binghamton.edu> 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
>
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