[Pilot workshop feedback]:

[murraycadzow]

1. Workshop details

We (myself and David Hood) ran a 1-day version using only the alternative R ecology curriculum at University of Otago, NZ on 24 May. The workshop was in-person and we had 13 learners with a range of backgrounds in terms of career stage from post-graduate to research staff but by domain. About half were using this as an R refresher and the other half this was their first experience with R.

2. What did the Instructors find worked well when teaching the lesson?

Starting off with ggplot got learners quite engaged and throughout the day there seemed to be a nice incremental flow of building skills

I had always skipped the database section of the old lesson so that wasn't missed

3. What did the Instructors find that could be improved in the lesson?

We ended with the content split intro/ggplot before lunch and the explore/working with data post lunch. In the afternoon people were starting to disengage and by the time we finished the working with data section it felt a bit anti-climatic - compared to the old lesson where you did a whole bunch of data mangling to then get the reward of plotting.

We both really thought that quarto/rmarkdown is an essential topic that should be included when researchers about R

4. Do the Instructors have any other feedback on the lesson?

The inclusion of quarto/rmd would be an excellent addition and including that as a final topic could act as a capstone project where learners essentially repeat a subsection of data wrangling and ggplot to create a final report document

5. Were the Instructors able to teach the whole lesson in the time available?

We skipped small pieces here and there to stay within the workshop time

6. Tell us more about the lesson duration

Intro R/Rstudio ~30 min
ggplot ~120min
data exploration ~75min
data wrangling ~100 min

7. If the Instructors have also taught the official version of the Data Analysis and Visualization with R for Ecologists lesson, how do they think this redesigned version compares to it?

I like the new version better but I think due to the ordering one of the applicable reasons to learn about factors is to reorder categories on plots and this is missing - this lesson doesn't really provide an example about why or how you would practically use them

8. Please share any feedback collected from Learners during the lesson pilot.

There was a little bit of feed about how tidyverse centric things were

9. How did the Instructors feel that this absence affected the overall usefulness of the lesson?

No response

10. How important do you think it is that content about R and databases be added back into this redesigned lesson?

It never felt relevant to our learners in previous workshops

11. Is there anything else you would like to tell us?

Overall the new lesson feels like a really good improvement on the old lesson and I'm looking forward to teaching it again.

[tobyhodges]

Thanks so much for piloting the lesson and taking the time to make this report, @murraycadzow.

@datacarpentry/curriculum-advisors-ecology and @datacarpentry/r-ecology-lesson-maintainers: please review Murray's feedback and consider opening individual issues based on comments here that you think should be followed up. When that is done, this issue can be closed in favour of the more granular tasks and contributions.