title: Approaches to R education in Canadian universities.
abstract: Introduction:R language is a powerful tool used in a wide array of research disciplines and owes a large amount of its success to its open source and adaptable nature. The popularity of R has grown rapidly over the past two decades and the number of users and packages is increasing at a near exponential rate. This rapid growth has prompted a number of formal and informal online and text resources, the volume of which is beginning to present challenges to novices learning R. Students are often first exposed to R in upper division undergraduate classes or during their graduate studies. The way R is presented likely has consequences for the fundamental understanding of the program and language itself; user comprehension of R may be better if learning the language itself followed by conducting analyses, compared to someone who is learning another subject (e.g. statistics) using R for the first time. Consequently, an understanding of the approaches to R education is critical.Methods:To establish how students are exposed to R, we used a survey to evaluate the current use in Canadian university courses, including the context in which R is presented and the types of uses of R in the classroom. Additionally, we looked at the reasons professors either do or don't use/teach R.Results:We found that R is used in a broad range of course disciplines beyond statistics (e.g. ecology) and just over one half of Canadian universities have at least one course that uses R.Discussion and Conclusions:Developing programming-literate students is of utmost importance and our hope is that this benchmark study will influence how post-secondary educators, as well as other programmers, approach R, specifically when developing educational and supplemental content in online, text, and package-specific formats aiding in student's comprehension of the R language.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology and the Vale Living with Lakes Centre, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Canada.
authors.forename: Michael A
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-8146-2818
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Carson
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology and the Vale Living with Lakes Centre, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Canada.
authors.forename: Nathan
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Basiliko
keywords: R; RStudio; data analysis; higher education; open source; programming; statistics