Challenges and opportunities in the phased introduction of R teaching for medical science students.

The growth of “big data” in medical sciences research in recent years has led to an increased demand for coding skills. This can clearly be observed in industry with employers actively seeking applicants with experience of open access languages such as R and Python. However, teaching coding presents many challenges such as time constraints within existing degree programmes and lack of experience amongst teaching staff. Here we share our experiences of the phased introduction of R teaching to undergraduate medical science students.

Our first approach was to develop an optional online resource called “Introduction to R”. The format was short lecture recordings including slides covering theory and demos in RStudio. To allow students to code in their own time, we provided an R notebook which could be used as a self-directed tutorial. This contained the code used in the videos, the expected outputs and explanations of the syntax. While we targeted this resource at years 3 and 4, all medical science undergraduates had access through a shared VLE. In June 2022, we introduced a live introduction to R seminar to an existing summer research seminar series targeted at both undergraduate and postgraduate students. The feedback was very positive and free text comments indicated there was a demand for in person workshops.

In response to this, we have recently developed a 2 h face to face workshop. While intended as a follow on session to the R seminar, the workshop was targeted at beginners and assumed no prior knowledge. This covered basic syntax, installing R and RStudio, simple calculations, importing data and running a t-test. Feedback for each activity was collected via anonymous surveys which included both 10-point Likert scales and free text questions.