September 2020 meeting: improving diversity and teaching R

Hi everyone,

We're BACK!

Our September session will be on 16th, so join us from 5.30pm online. As usual, the meeting will be open for all to attend, and newcomers / beginners are very welcome.

Our online meetings are kindly being enabled by Red Hat (https://www.redhat.com/).

Our speakers are Greg Sutcliffe and Melanie Stefan. Greg is the Community Data Scientist for Ansible, where he spends his time doing analysis and tool-building to improve how the upstream community operates. Melanie is a Senior Lecturer in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. Her lab (http://stefanlab.net) uses computational modelling and simulations to understand learning and memory.

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## How R helps with Red Hat's Conscious Language project

### Greg Sutcliffe (https://twitter.com/Gwmngilfen)

In June, Red Hat's CTO published a blog (https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/making-open-source-more-inclusive-eradicating-problematic-language) on how Red Hat is committing to improving diversity and inclusion in the open source world.

The scope is vast - thousands of Git repositories, hundreds of thousands of text files to scan. In this talk, we'll take a look over the key R packages that helped me index the repos, and rapidly build a dashboard to track our progress.

We'll cover:

• googledrive
• pins
• git2r
• furrr & future
• plumber APIs

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## Designing meaningful assessments when teaching R

### Melanie Stefan (https://twitter.com/MelanieIStefan)

A growing number of institutions teach their students how to use R. For instructors, the question arises of how to design meaningful assessments. Meaningful assessments should capture the course learning objectives, and should also bear some resemblance to a "real" task the student may have to do later in their professional life. They may also need to capture additional skills, such as the ability to work in teams. In the past year, I have taught R within an "Applied Data Science" course for undergraduate students in the Edinburgh-Zhejiang joint degree programme in Bioinformatics in China. In this talk, I will share my experiences with assessments in this course, including what went well and what very much did not go well.

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Looking forward to seeing you there!!

/f