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This interactive online MSD Skills training course is aimed at MSD postgraduate research students and staff with minimal or no programming experience who want to perform basic data analysis in R and get familiar with programming environment.

Which course is for me?

MSD Skills runs several courses in statistics that have similar titles to this course. Here is a short description of this course vs other available courses to help you decide if you should sign up:

Fundamentals of statistical software and analysis (FoSSA): Runs ONLINE, at your own pace. Gives a brief overview of statistical theory and how to carry out a wide variety of statistical tests in R, Stata, or SPSS. 

Introduction to Statistics: Runs in person over 4 days. Gives an in-depth understanding of fundamental statistical theory. Does not use any software. Students may want to take this course prior to signing up for FoSSA.

Intro to R for Biologists (this course): Runs online over 2 days. Gives a more in-depth understanding to use the software R and make basic plots. Covers some basic statistical tests. You could take this course before or after taking FoSSA; FoSSA will show you how to run a wider variety of statistical tests in R.

Data Analysis & Visualisation in R: Runs online over 3 days. This is a more advanced course covering programming, data wrangling and visualisation in R. It does not cover statistical tests but shows how statistical information can be visualised in plots.

COURSE AIM FOR INTRO TO R FOR BIOLOGISTS

You are expected to attend 2 sessions:

  • Tuesday 23 April, 09.30 - 13.00
  • Tuesday 30 April, 09:30 - 13.00

This course is aimed at those with minimal or no programming experience to perform basic data analysis in R and get familiar with the programming environment. By the end of this module, you will be able to explore your own data in R including basic statistics, plotting, and data reorganisation.

COURSE OBJECTIVES

By the end of this course, you will learn:

how to set up your R environment, how to handle simple biological data, and how to look for help

how to load and clean your data and perform basic statistical analysis

how to reorganise and summarise your tabular data

how to create simple graphs to explore your data

COURSE FORMAT

The course is structured into 2 half-day sessions as follows:

Session 1 - Setting up your R environment, reading and writing data files, looking at and filtering the data

Session 2 - Data exploration - conditionals, loops, basic graphs and basic statistics, loading and installing packages

PARTICIPANT NUMBERS

25

HOW IT WILL WORK

It is highly recommended to go through the material up to and including the 'data types and structures' lesson on the R for Data Science LinkedIn course (https://www.linkedin.com/learning/learning-r-2/r-for-data-science) before the first session on 19th January. Access to this material is free through your Oxford single-sign on (SSO) account.

Each 3-hour session would consist of a mix of teaching and hands-on training, with a feedback from the tutors and Q&A at the end. You are expected to interact with the instructors and other course participants during the sessions for problem-solving and assignments. The code and worksheets for this course will become available at the first session and can be accessed anytime during and after the course.

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

Software requirements:

•         R (version 4.0 or higher) which you can download using this link.

•         Rstudio (Desktop free version), which you can download, using this link: https://rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/

Any installation questions could be addressed to courses@medsci.ox.ac.uk

Hardware requirements:

It is highly recommended to have an access to the microphone and ideally a second screen during the sessions.

ATTENDANCE CERTIFICATE ON SURVEY COMPLETION

In order to receive a certificate of attendance, participation in both sessions is mandatory. Once you have completed the course, you will be sent an email with a link to the overall course survey, where you can propose the topics, which you would like to be covered in a follow-up advanced module - Data analysis & visualisation in R.

When you have filled in and submitted the survey, you will be sent an email with a link to your attendance certificate. Survey results are downloaded and stored anonymously.