2019 rstudio::conf Train-the-trainer post-workshop thread

A big thank you to everyone who attended our Train-the-trainer workshops at 2019 rstudio::conf!

This thread is a place for attendees to:

  • keep in touch with each other
  • share insights about what's worked and what hasn't in your own workshops
  • brainstorm new ideas
  • ask for feedback
  • enjoy being part of a community of teachers who use R

If you'd like to participate, begin by saying hello! Here are a few useful links to start things off.

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Hello! thank you for starting this thread

So does this mean we can officially add "RStudio Certified Tidyverse Trainer" to our CV? Is that a title you track or can verify?

Thanks for the thread and the course! I've been working to develop an afternoon workshop on ggplot2 for an upcoming conference, and the material has been enormously helpful.

Hi everyone! I enjoyed meeting and working with you all during the workshop. Looking forward to any discussions that grow from the group. -- Charles

It was great to meet you all last week!

At DataCamp, we have a lot of documentation to help instructors build courses. While much of it is specific to DataCamp, here are a few links that may be useful to anyone teaching data science.

One of the big things that I've fallen over before is not thinking enough about who my target audience is. I loved the discussion of learner personas that we had in the workshop - it's a great way to avoid this pitfall, but it can be tricky to write your own. Here are the ones that DataCamp uses.

And of course, it can be tricky to find good datasets to teach. Here are some links to data sources.

... and the banned list of datasets that are used too much.

I hope this is useful! Please reply with any other teaching resources you'd like to share.

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These are fantastic resources, Richie! Thanks so much for sharing.

I am getting most of my data sets for courses through data.world -- they come out with fabulous new datasets on a wide variety of topics every week. They seem especially apt at publishing data sets on related to social justice issues - like rates of gun crime in major cities, ICE detention center locations and populations, incidences of hate crime, household income by county in CA, and many more. I am particularly interested in these. I'm looking forward to looking through the links shared in your "sources of data".

  • Nicole
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Fabulous, Garrett! Thank you for creating the list and everyone else thanks for joining and getting on board. I had originally thought to find you each individually through twitter to set up a discussion board like this - but this is much much better!

I do small training on the tidyverse among grad students that already use R and want to up their game and improve their workflow.

This fall, I'll be running a multi week series of workshops for community college students in a course called "Intro to Data Mining for Social Justice." The goal of the course is more to build students' confidence in being generators of new knowledge and evaluators of popular claims, rather than master the tidyverse packages per se.

I look forward to sharing and learning about our teaching experiences along the way!

best, Nicole

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@richierocks These are fantastic!

I'm surprised to see Gapminder on the banned list, but not diamonds. I guess I'm guilty of helping to make some of these datasets uncool.

@mrflick feel free to mention that you've taken the RStudio Train-the-trainer certification course. Official certification will require you to pass a qualification exam, which is almost finished being developed. We will be able to track everyone who passes the exam in a database connected to community.rstudio.com, so your badges, etc. will automatically show up alongside your name.

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Ha! Good spot. I have just banned diamonds.

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I just talked to the community organizer and he has community.rstudio.com badges coming your way for attending the course (i.e. everyone's way). They will match up to your account automatically if you registered for community.rstudio.com with the same email address that you used to register for the Train-the-trainer course.

If you used a different email address, please email me the address you used for community.rstudio.com (you can reply to the thread invite that I sent earlier today - also feel free to contact the community organizer @EconomiCurtis if you have any questions about these badges) Thanks everyone!

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Thank you for sharing @garrett !

Hello everyone. It was nice to meet many of you in Austin last week; I have spent most of this week thinking about the material we discussed.

@garrett I'm very interested in taking that qualifying exam when it's released - will you be emailing course participants about it, or should I watch this thread for updates?

Thanks!

I will email the course participants when the certification exam/program is available, but since this puts you at the mercy of my memory (a weak link!) also keep an eye on this thread.

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@garrett Thanks for creating this thread :slight_smile: Will it be possible to do the certification exam online or somewhere in Europe? Or would it require to come to the US (I'm from Germany)?

@seb09 Unfortunately, I do not know. I won't be able to confirm any details about the qualification process until it is announced.

I'm kind of surprised by that. I thought given the workshop's title and description that the main purpose was to be certified. At least that's how I justified the expense of attending the conference. Is there somewhere a written policy about exactly what's involved in certification to clear up any confusion? I feel a bit misled.

Hey guys,

If you weren't already aware, there's a lot of interesting insight in David Robinson's blog post about teaching the tidyverse to beginners:

It's very clear that he and Garrett agree on many fronts!

Nicole

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I just issued badges to everyone I found who took the Tidyverse Train the Trainer amd Shiny Train the Trainer courses.

If you missed out on getting yours, please reach out to me via direct-message.

Note that these will appear and be promoted on our instructors and consultants directory community.rstudio.com/instructors.

003 teach-shiny-logo

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