datacarpentry
smoothing transition between episodes
Submitted by email from trainee -
In terms of independence of the section inside the lesson and for practicality, I have a suggestion for the transition from the section "Manipulating, analyzing and exporting data with tidyverse", which ends creating a new data frame that is used in the next section "Data visualization with ggplot2". I would recommend to include a line of code at the beginning of the section "Data visualization with ggplot2" that will allow to extract that data from an online file. Is this way, if the lesson needed to be interrupted after finishing the section "Manipulating, analyzing and exporting data with tidyverse" (i.e. start the following section the next day), participants do not need to run the whole code from the previous section but instead they can download the data directly from internet.
I agree that this could be helpful! Another option, if this is the schedule of your workshop (and you know in advance), would be for the instructor to have the surveys_complete.csv file on a memory stick / dropbox etc. so that anyone who is having trouble finding their local version (or who maybe missed the previous episode) can participate in Data Visualization without back-tracking.
Perhaps this file and/or the code to create it could live in the instructors notes here https://datacarpentry.org/R-ecology-lesson/instructor-notes, not in the lesson itself (so learners do not automatically rely on the provided downloadable file). Either way it would be good for the instructor to have a shareable copy on hand, in some format - something I will think about when I teach this lesson.
that's a good point. We'll have to think more about how to best include this link in the episode, but in the meantime, the file should be available for direct download from here: https://github.com/datacarpentry/R-ecology-lesson/blob/gh-pages/data/portal_data_joined.csv?raw=true
