Joining the RStudio Tidyverse Instructor community
Sharing my experience on the process to obtain RStudio Instructor certification.
Fundations of my motivation
Early 2020, in a pre-pandemic world, I attended my first Rladies meetup in London by Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel. Part of the reasons I decided to attended was because my husband was going to be away for the foreseeable months, so I decided to give myself the chance to connect with other Rladies. It was only few months before that meetup that I started using the Tidyverse, although I used R for many years in the past. It was a fantastic talk where I met some very cool Rladies and I got super impressed by Mine’s teaching abilities.
During the past year, and because of continous lockdowns and WFH, I really dived into the Tidyverse: I joint LatinR talks, participated in Rladies Barcelona Florence Nightingale content, I watched Tidytuesday screencasts, opened a blog with Hugo, Rblogdown and Netlify (thanks to the amazing resources shared by Alison Hill). I could easily say that the Tidyverse mission 🛰 keep my mental health afloat during such difficult times.
Moreover, during the summer of 2020 I got some formal teaching training from university of London where I learn concepts like Blooms taxonomy and I started to give by-weekly workshops for biology researcher co-workers of mine where I introduce them to ggplot2 and statistical concepts such as correlation.
All these things had a direct impact on my research career; for instance I published my first R package and gave my first EuroBioconductor short talk.
Why I decided to become an RStudio Tidyverse
I decided to get certificated for several reasons:
- Getting additional formal training on how to teach. I felt I and my audience could benefit more the better trained for training I would be.
- Pushing myself to really know inside out the Tidyverse. Getting the training forced me to read the R4DS book and doing the exercises thoroughly. I used additional fantastic resources such as https://datasciencebox.org/. Later, I learn that there are book clubs for some of the most popular R books, something that I somewhat missed, but I am very excited to join in 2021 the tidymodels book club organised by Jon Harmon.
The RStudio Instructor training journey has properly equipped me to do and teach data science! This process pushed me out of my comfort zone for which I will be forever grateful.
During the training
- Instructor training covering modern teaching methods. Materials for this training are available here
This was a two half days course where Greg Wilson lead such inspiring modules. What I like the most was feeling part of the learning community, the interactivity of the modules and genuinely learning about evidence-based effective teaching methods.
Be nice, the rest is on the details –Greg
Between training and exam
Materials
Books. Reading the book Teaching Tech Together written by Greg. The book is currently undergoing translation into Spanish by a team of volunteers and I am honored to be among them thanks to Yanina Bellini Saibene.
Guides. Going through R4DS instructor’s guide which has learning objectives and key points for each chapter of R4DS book.
Concept maps. Building concept maps to design lessons taking into account cognitive load is a big part of the training. When preparing for the two exams I found this resource extremely useful to check I was building an accurate mental model of the topics covered in R4DS. I built myself quite a lot of mental models that you can find here
Greg also asked us to send an email with what we remember and so I did this concept map (there is a lot of information buried beneath my bad hand writing)
- Watching and reading other people’s experiences.
Process to become a certified Rstudio instructor a video where some Mi-useRs (minority R users) talk about their experiences and motivations to become a certified Rstudio instructor.
Obtaining RStudio certification. A shared path a post by Yanina on her journey to obtain RStudio certification.
Reflections by Brendan Cullen’s on RStudio Instructor Training .
Overview by Silvia Canelon of the RStudio Instructor certification process. Check her post since she has an amazing collection of resources to support anyone on their certification journey.
- Active learning .
With some of the materials I use during my learning, I created some exercises using the learnr package, which is such a powerful and versatile way to create interactive exercises. This is my humble contribution to fading exercises with Penguins and I hope to extend these materials in user!2021 later this year
I also gave a mocked presentation to Riva Quiroga and Yanina Bellini over Zoom and received extremely useful feedback. Gracias chicas!!
During the teaching exam
- A 90-minute teaching exam based on content from the instructor training. This includes a 15-minute demonstration lesson and a written component. Mine was on RStudio projects and my learner persona was Lovorka. You can see my contribution here.
During the Tidyverse exam
- A 90-minute Tidyverse exam to test your knowledge of the subject matter in R for Data Science (make sure to check the program FAQs for information about the Shiny exam). I hope to share my exercise soon.
Voilà!
Joining this community is a dream… that may become true for you too? 🍎
Maria Dermit
Postdoctoral Research Scientist
Postdoctoral researcher interested in translation control and data science for biomedical research.