One Semester, Two Languages: How to Teach R and Python to Business School Students?

Abstract

It is crazy to teach business students both R and Python at the same time! It was my thought when asked to teach such a course in 2020. However, after one-semester’s heavy struggle together with my students, I found that such a course is not only possible, but also desirable. In this paper, my teaching experiences are summarized into several areas: 1) write my own lecture notes; 2) use concepts and formulae suitable for business students; 3) tons of in-class exercises; 4) use the same formulae, data sets or even the same exercises several times; 5) recording my own video for each chapter even for a face-to-face lecture; 6) over 1,000 small programs; 7) many useful utility functions, and 8) teach R first, then compare Python with R constantly.