By Faruk Guder & Mary Malliaris (Loyola University Chicago)
Information
We present our experiences in using R for data analysis in our statistics courses. The students in our statistics courses are not expected to be R programmers or to have had previous exposure to R. They simply need to be able to use the functions available in R to obtain the output for statistical analysis. All the needed functions are provided to the students with examples. Many of the functions in R are very intuitive. Being familiar with using the R functions, the students are also well prepared to use the advanced features of R in the following core business analytics courses, where R is used as the software, and they are also prepared to do R analysis in their jobs upon graduation. We will also present some challenges of including R, our suggestions for addressing these challenges and share students’ reviews of the courses using R as the software.