R-course: R-tools for teaching and research

Teacher: Dr. Sofia Gil-Clavel

When: Every Friday between 9:30 and 12:30hrs. Starting on September 18th until October 9th, 2026.

Where: Hybrid is possible, but onsite is preferable.

To register: https://forms.office.com/e/xBY9gP3upc. Researchers from the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities have priority, but we have 5 spots reserved for people from other faculties. First-Come-First-Served applies.

Requisites:

• You should have followed the R-Course: R for Social Scientists or have experience with the first 5 sessions of that course.
• Basic R knowledge is necessary.

Description

A common problem when teaching R is that lecturers have to deal with students’ different operating systems. This creates a lot of friction between the course intended learning outcomes and the amount of time lecturers have to spend solving students’ R installations.

Besides that problem, we will also cover:

• How to standardize students’ homework. So that, it is easier to discover fraud and to grade!
• How to make the best use of VU resources to teach R.
• How to publish your course materials with a DOI, while performing version control, e.g. https://zenodo.org/records/20828330.

If you recognized yourself, then this course is for you!

Itinerary

During this course, we will cover the following:

1. [Sep 18th] Refresher of R-base and tidyverse packages.
2. [Sep 25th] R-Markdown.
3. [Oct 2nd] VU tools for teaching and research.
4. [Oct 9th] Create a repo or a webpage for your teaching materials, e.g. https://github.com/SofiaG1l/R_Course.