3  The shape of the course

The workshop is four hours in the room, but the learner journey is longer. It starts with pre-course work done at home and ends with a wrap-up that points forward. Understanding this shape tells you where to put your effort.

flowchart TD
    classDef layer fill:#f7f9fc,stroke:#c7d2e0,color:#1f2933;

    B["<b>Before the day</b><br/>pre-course work: accounts, installs, first commit"]:::layer
    D["<b>The four hours</b><br/>welcome and baseline map → create and clone → commit cycle →<br/>team work → branch → pull request → wrap-up and closing map"]:::layer
    A["<b>After the day</b><br/>second part: task and project management; later, agentic coding"]:::layer

    B --> D --> A

3.1 Pre-course work carries the setup

The single biggest risk to a hands-on workshop is spending the first ninety minutes installing software. So none of that happens in the room. Every account and install is pre-course work, done at home, days before, with a verification step that proves it worked.

The pre-work is a short, numbered sequence the learner follows on their own: install R and RStudio, create a GitHub account, complete the pre-course survey (which is what triggers the invitation to the cohort organization), generate a personal access token, install Git, work through a three-part setup test that ends with a first pushed commit and an issue assigned to the instructor, and do one short reading. Chapter 6 turns this into the exact checklist you hand out.

The verification step is the point. A learner whose first commit landed before the workshop arrives ready to learn. A learner who skipped the pre-work is a support case you address through direct communication before the workshop, not during the teaching. Pre-work gaps cannot be fixed in a break; the pre-course survey and follow-up (Chapter 10) exist so that nobody arrives unprepared.

New educator: protect the pre-work due date. Send it with enough lead time. The pre-course survey (Chapter 10) is partly there to tell you who has not finished.

3.2 The four hours are mostly hands-on

The in-room time is a tight loop: a short concept, then a “your turn” task where everyone does it, then a regroup. The slides exist to frame each loop, not to fill time. The real content is the learners’ own hands on their own keyboards.

Chapter 11 breaks the four hours into a timed run of show. The structure is always the same: motivate, demonstrate once, hand it over, regroup.

3.3 The side benefits are real

The headline outcome is Git and GitHub for collaboration. But because the workshop runs inside R, RStudio, and real project files, learners absorb three things additionally:

  • More fluency in R and RStudio. They use the interface for real work, not toy examples, and grow more comfortable with it.

  • A first taste of Quarto. The material they touch is authored in Quarto. They see how prose, code, and output live in one document, which plants a seed for reproducible reporting.

  • Reversibility as a habit. The gitforsci-ghe run made this an explicit side benefit: a revert demonstration and the repeated message that almost everything in Git is reversible leave learners more willing to try things, on their own work, because they trust they can undo. Name it in the wrap-up alongside the two above.

The course stays entirely in the point-and-click interface of RStudio and GitHub; there is no terminal work in the base workshop, and the run of show (Chapter 11) is built on that. A small amount of terminal work could be added in a future iteration, at which point “less afraid of the command line” would join this list; until then, do not promise it.

Name these benefits in the wrap-up. Learners came for Git, and it helps them to notice they also moved forward on three other fronts.

3.4 The wrap-up points forward

The last block is not a summary slide. It is a short reflection on what they can now do, an explicit naming of the side benefits above, and a pointer to what comes next: the planned second part on task and project management, and agentic coding on the longer horizon (see what is still to come). The goal is momentum: they should leave wanting to use this on their own work tomorrow.