This course is 5 units, and is specifically designed and optimized for online instruction and learning.
Course Description
The primary goals of this course are (1) to teach fundamental skills of “data management,” which are important regardless of which programming language is used, and (2) to develop a strong foundation in the R programming language. The course is designed for students who never thought they would become programmers. No prior experience with R is required.
Goal (1), most statistics courses teach students how to analyze data that are ready for analysis. In real research projects, data management – the process of cleaning, manipulating, and integrating datasets in order to create analysis datasets – is often more challenging than conducting analyses.
Goal (2), R is a free, open-source, object-oriented programming language. R is the most popular language for statistical analysis and one of the most popular languages for “data science” applications (e.g., web-scraping, interactive maps, network analysis). Students will become proficient in data management and R programming through weekly problem sets, which will be completed in groups.