Figure One Lab Course Update: How Much Guidance Is Too Much?

Here is another update on my progress in building Figure One Lab online courses designed to help biologists pick up computational skills less painfully.

In a previous article in this newsletter, I explained that these courses will be hosted on Posit Cloud, for the coding components, and Kajabi, for the non-coding components. Eventually, students will also need to get their hands on additional computational resources, either through a Cloud Basic subscription at $25/month or through their personal computers.

I also talked about the first Figure One Lab course, which will be called "Bare Minimum R". The goal of this course is to get a biologist with little to no experience coding in R to independently clean up an actual, messy biological dataset and create some informative, exploratory plots with it.

Well, I'm pretty much done with "Bare Minimum R" content. The last thing I need to figure out is how much explicit guidance I need to provide for students to have a meaningful, positive learning experience. In other words, how much do I spoon-feed vs push people off the proverbial cliff? How much hand-holding is helpful without being detrimental? I want to strike the balance between making the course challenging enough that students are actually expanding their computational toolkit, but not so challenging that people get discouraged and give up.

So here's a question for any prospective "Bare Minimum R" students out there. Which option below seems more attractive to you?

Option 1: A Lot of Guidance

Here is an example of what a lot of hand-holding might look like.

Download the data at Website X.

Read in the data with read.csv(). Here are the arguments you might need to use with read.csv().

Now print out the data frame. Identify which columns you don't need. Remove those columns.

Have you checked for duplicated rows and columns? You might need to use duplicated(). What's one way to handle duplicated rows/columns?

Omitting many more lines of instruction here for the sake of being succinct.

There is an answer key at the end of the lesson. Check there if you get stuck.

Option 2: Little Guidance

Here is an example of what pushing people off the proverbial cliff might look like.

Download the data at Website X.

Read in the data. Clean it up to meet the specifications we had discussed before. You will need to use ChatGPT to figure out things we have never covered before.

Now create a plot to answer the following biological question: What are the 10 most highly variable genes within samples in the RNA-seq dataset we are analyzing that are coming from either colorectal or skin cells?

Conclusion

As I am writing this, I have become more clear what I should do. I will probably give people Option 2, the more challenging option, first. Then given the feedback I get from students, I can always add in more guidance.

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That's all I have for now! More updates to come in the weeks ahead. I aim to have "Bare Minimum R" available by January 1, 2025.

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