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Live Online Course – 10th Edition

Introduction to R: starting from scratch

November 2nd-6th, 2026

Introduction to R

Course Overview

The aim of this course is to give an introduction to R addressed to people who have never used R.

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

  • Understand R syntax and navigate RStudio software sufficiently to author (or identify, evaluate, and apply) code specific to their individual research fields
  • Identify and apply code and workflow strategies that promote reproducibility, efficiency, and collaboration
  • Confidently anticipate and troubleshoot common errors and gain help from the R user community

Instruction via lecture and live-coding will be followed by exercises and multichoice questions to practice and evaluate skills.  Students will have the option to perform exercises with class data or their own data.

Places are limited to 16 participants.

Programme

Orientation to RStudio software and R language:

  • Manipulate basic data structures: vectors, matrices, dataframes, lists
  • Install code packages and use functions
  • Manage working directory and environment
  • Establish good coding style practices

Read and inspect data:

  • Import tabular, spatial, and other data formats
  • Perform quick data inspection via summary functions
  • Perform quick data inspections via plot functions

Data management:

  • Identify and handle missing values
  • Subset data by multiple methods
  • Create new variables
  • Group and summarize data
  • Join two datasets based on common ID value
  • Export data to common formats

Data visualization (ggplot2):

  • Create common graphs (scatterplot, boxplot, bar graph, time series plot)
  • Customize graph text and aesthetics
  • Export graphs to common image formats

Efficiency and reproducibility:

  • Identify common strategies to manage projects in R
  • Use R Markdown to interweave code and text
  • Find and evaluate R packages and help resources
  • Write your own functions to perform common tasks

Software

We will use R studio, which uses the code language R.

Dates & Schedule

Online live sessions on November 2nd-6th, 2026.

From 14:00 to 16:30 and from 17:30 to 20:00 (Madrid time zone).

Total course hours: 35.

The instructor will be available on Zoom each day from 20:00 to 21:00 to answer questions and solve problems with the exercises.

This course is equivalent to 1 ECTS (European Credit Transfer System). The recognition of ECTS by other institutions depends on each university or school.

Format

In the live sessions we will combine code demonstrations and lectures with hands-on computational exercises, in R.

Live sessions will be recorded. However, attendance to the live sessions is required to obtain the course certificate.

This course will be delivered in English.

Instructor

Ashton Drew instructor for Transmitting Science

Dr. Ashton Drew
KDV Decision Analysis LLC
United States of America

Registration Fees

  • Course Fee
  • Early bird (until September 30th, 2026):
  • 476 €
    (380.8 € for Ambassador Institutions)
  • Regular (after September 30th, 2026):
  • 570 €
    (456 € for Ambassador Institutions)
  • Prices include VAT.
    After registration you will receive confirmation of your acceptance on the course.
    Payment is not required during registration. Check discounts here.

Registration

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Organiser

Logo Transmitting Science

Collaborators

Logo COBCYL
Logo COBCV
Logo COBEUSKADI
Logo COBGA