A Complete Course for Social Scientists on Data Science Using R
Is your New Year’s resolution to learn R or to teach data science to psychology graduate students? If so, I have some great news for you. I have now freely released my course materials and lecture videos on R designed to teach data science to social scientists (in my case, psychologists). You can find them on datascience.tntlab.org.
The course combines four primary teaching techniques:
- Online assignments using datacamp.com, which teaches you and provides real-time feedback on brand new programming and data science skills.
- A lecture video that contextualizes what you learned on datacamp.com to social science (mostly psychology, but it is broadly applicable).
- A project applying learned skills to a social scientific context that you can complete on your own.
- A debriefing video that explains how the skills you learned in DataCamp and in lecture are used to meet project requirements.
If you are teaching or taking a class, there is zero cost to you or students. You can request premium DataCamp course access for you and your students for free. If you are doing this on your own, self-paced, you will need to pay for access to DataCamp (which is pretty reasonable).
I have previously used this course to teach psychology graduate students, usually in groups of 10 to 20. Almost all start with zero programming experience and end up as decent intermediate-level programmers. You can too!
So far, I have provided a sample syllabus, final exam, final project, weekly projects, and a complete course schedule. This initial release also includes 4 weeks of video content (both lectures and project debriefing), and I’ll be releasing the next 4 in a month, and the last 4 a month after that.
Please let me know how you like it!
I am also considering offering a live version of the course some time in the future. Please complete this survey if you think you might be interested in completing a version of this data science course live, such as via a MOOC or even in person.
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Hey Richard,
I just wanted to say your posting of this “last” year let me to the New Year’s resolution to teach the course this year (2019) in our IO and clinical MA programs. Thanks for being such a great I/O psychologist and helping spread tech and programming to the field. I would never have felt confident enough to structure an entire R course + data science on my own without your helpful way of organizing the material. The flow is so nice and really does a great job emphasizing fundamental of R itself. Much appreciated.
Best,
Dan