laser-institute/laser-orientation-1

Introduction to GitHub and RStudio basics and the "how's" of reproducible research.

LASER Orientation Lab Session

Orientation Introduction

Introduction to the concepts of open science and reproducible research for application to learning analytics using R and R Studio.The focus of our essential readings are to get LASER scholars oriented to the essentials of reproducible research. The Code-along includes introduction to the R integrated development environment and R basics (packages, functions, objects, and arguments). Understanding the basic syntax is key for using R and R packages. Written by Catherine Noonan, Jeanne McClure, Presented by Shaun Kellogg and Jenn Houchins at the Learning Analytics in STEM Education Research (LASER) workshop, July 11, 2022, through July 15, 2022, at the Friday Institute, North Carolina State University.

Reproducible Research

This presentation provides a conceptual overview of reproducible research, particularly as it pertains to open science, and describe the core practices of reproducible research.

GitHub Desktop

This presentation introduces the concept of version control as a one core practice of reproducible research. The presentation will cover adding version control to the learning analytics workflow using github.com and an application called Github Desktop. We will become familiar with navigating github.com and examining the file structures associated with repositories.

The accompanying walkthrough introduces Github Desktop as a tool for the creation of new repositories, cloning the LASER Learning Lab repositories, and navigating to the resulting local copy of the repository to make changes to the files contained within the project. At the end of this walkthrough, we will have an R project set up for the next presentation in this orientation session.

RStudio Desktop

This presentation introduction the RStudio Desktop environment and getting started with R. We will become familiar with the R Environment, setting up global options, creating R scripts and the basic grammar of the R programming language.

The accompanying code-along introduces basic programming concepts in R, such as using functions, proving arguments to functions, creating objects, and installing packages. Finally, we will learn how to knit RMarkdown files to produce readable, shareable versions of our work.

Wrapping Up

After completing the walkthrough and code-along accompanying these orientation presentations, we will wrap up by examining our code changes in Github Desktop and introduce the concept of committing and pushing our changes to github.com. Finally, we will introduce setting up Github Pages as an easy means of sharing research online directly from a Github repository.

At the end of the orientation presentations, we will cover the hands-on work of completing a Learning Lab case study to earn your first LASER badge (shown above).