I have been asked to host an Introduction to R workshop for the analyst team of the company that I work for. It's a large retail company. Currently it's only me and one more person that uses are extensivly. My idea is to follow the R for Data Science book by Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund.
Today the team primarily uses SQL and Excel to do analysis. For statistical modelling one of the analysts has an SPSS-license. The teams amibition is to move more of the analysis to R to excel (without Excel) in Data Science. However, their ambitions are pretty scattered. Some of them want to develop skills in Machine Learning, others in A/B testing and some in forecasting. So I'm trying to figure out a way to keep everybody happy.
For the setup I plan to use RStudio Cloud.
As for the curriculum I have proposed 4 half day blocks to cover the basic. The blocks will be spread out during two weeks.
Block 1: Introduction to R
Here I will focus on dplyr and tidyr to tidy and transform data
Block 2: Visualization in R
Mainly ggplot2 but here I'll also introduce Rmarkdown and how to build reports
Block 3 Databases in R and case study
I'll introduce some best practices on how to work with databases in R, how they can use dplyr as a front end to the SQL-server. Furthermore, here I'll introduce a case study so they can practice retrieving data from the database and make analysis in rmarkdown using the skills from block 1 and 2.
Block 4 Statistical modelling in R
I'm not quite sure what to put into this block. My first thought was to do something about A/B testing in R, so that they can further test their current campaigns. However, more people (10 today) have signed up for the workshop and maybe only 3-4 are intersted in A/B testing. So I'm thinking of switching this to something more broad. Maybe just how to do some basic modelling in R using tidy tools for modelling, that can be extended to different areas such as time series analysis.
This is not my first workshop in R, however, I have a feeling there's a lot at stake here and I really want to get the team up running in R because I think it will benefit us hugely.
What are your thoughts about this curriculum or setup? Would you have done it differently? Can you see any pitfalls?
Thanks in advance,
Filip