Brendan Clarke 2022-10-24

This training course is an introduction to statistics. It’s aimed at users in health, social care, and housing.

It will cover a mixture of theory and practice. Currently available in two variants:

• R
• Excel

It assumes a little bit of prior experience with both software platforms.

You can take any combination of the sessions in any order. Of necessity, there is some overlap between sessions, but in general they are independent and can be mixed-and-matched to suit your interest.

The training is delivered as a series of live Teams session using Rstudio Cloud.

If you’ve never used Rstudio Cloud before, it’s a SaaS version of Rstudio in the browser. Note that because it’s a web service, it requires you to upload your data to their servers, which might makes it unsuitable for production work in health and care owing to information governance concerns. That said, it’s an excellent venue for training, because it solves many of the difficulties regarding R versions, permissions, etc that are a feature of using R on the desktop. It’s also very easy to transfer projects from RStudio Cloud to an installed version of R, so don’t worry that what you learn here will be tied to the cloud forever.

As RStudio Cloud is a web service, you don’t need a particularly up-to-date computer to completed this training. As long as you have a reliable internet connection, and are capable of making a video call with Microsoft Teams (for the face-to-face part of the training), then you should be fine. The demonstration has been tested on Windows 10, Windows 11, and Ubuntu Linux 21.04 without platform-specific difficulties.

It is extremely helpful, although not essential, to have a multi-monitor setup. That way you can run the demonstration in one screen, and the Teams call on the other.

You should also, as discussed above, be fairly comfortable with R basics before you enrol on this training. Do please get in touch with [email protected] to discuss if you are unsure.

You’ll need to do a little bit of preparation before the first training session, which should take about 15 minutes to complete. Please make sure you have completed this before the start of the first session so that we can make a prompt start. If you’re new to RStudio Cloud, please follow the step-by-step instructions below. If you’ve worked with RStudio Cloud before, you can just sign-in to your account at RStudio Cloud, create a new project from the GitHub Repository at https://github.com/bclarke-nes/basic-stats.

It is also possible to complete the training using the desktop version of Rstudio. This training was written using R 4.2.1, and you may encounter some difficulties related to versions if your installed R is very different from this.

1. Go to https://rstudio.cloud/ (will need to change to posit)
2. If you have an account, you can log in as normal. Otherwise, please create a new account by selecting Get started for free, following the steps, and then signing-in
3. Once you’ve signed-in to RStudio Cloud, add a new project by clicking New Project >> New Project from a Git repository. When prompted, enter the URL https://github.com/bclarke-nes/basic-stats
4. That will give you a new project containing the files needed for this training

By the end of these session, the user should: