Proposed improvements (after GESIS)

[EllaKaye]

I taught a version of this course on behalf of GESIS in November 2025 and, as following that experience, and feedback from those participants, I propose the following changes to the workshop. They could be bought back into this repo from my fork for that offering (repo, website).

I appreciate this should be split into several issues, but dumping it all here for now. The main difference from the previous offering from Forwards is that I taught each module over 2 hours, rather than 90 minutes, without substantially increasing the content, and this worked much better in terms of allowing more time for questions, discussions and examples.

• Changes to dependencies section
  • Add slide to introduce the idea
  • Go back to %>% (rather than %+%, but link to roperators package)
  • Add links to %>% vs |> slide (to my slides from R Foundations, and the Pipe Dreams post)
  • Or take out the whole infix operator thing (or make it an aside)
• Move 'packaging data' to start of module 3
• Minute cards for feedback after each session ("What worked well about the session today?", "What would improve your learning experience on the course?")
• Better conceptual introduction to unit testing (why do it)
• Show examples of how things are done in established packages, esp. packaging data and unit testing.
• Two hour sessions
  • Allows recap of previous session (important when teaching one a fortnight)
  • More time for questions/discussions
  • Time to show other packages
  • Add a couple of exercises/extended examples
    • Introduce a function that causes R CMD check warnings and notes
    • check_arg() function (actually useful!) and more on {cli} syntax
  • Extended Q&A/discussion at end of module 6 (or buffer time in case other modules run long)