The LAN based practicals in this module are broken up into three categories which will need to be submitted at different times and in different formats. This page will give instructions on how to compile and submit your reports.
The first set of questions are worksheet based. On each practical’s webpage you will see a heading called “worksheet questions”. The questions will become available during the practical and will be based on Shiny Apps (see here for a tutorial) and you will have the entire practical session to complete these questions. You will be required to write the answers to these questions on an exam pad and hand them in to the demonstrators before or at the end of the practical session. No submissions later than 17:10 will be accepted. Please bring stationery and an exam pad/book to the practical sessions.
The second set of questions that you will need to complete are “coding questions”. These questions will test your ability to problem solve the R code required to produce a particular figure output based on the model in question. You will generally be supplied with some code which contains errors. Your task is to identify and correct these errors to produce the desired output.
To submit your solutions for this set of questions you will copy your completed code from RStudio into a Word document . You will then give a brief description of the changes that you made to the initial code that was supplied to you. You can preferably do this by inserting comments over the code that you have changed or alternatively by writing a short paragraph explaining the process that you followed.
You may begin working on your answers to these questions during the practical sessions provided you have finished the worksheet questions. You can use this time to ask the demonstrators for any problems you might be experiencing. You will have until 13:45 on the day of the following practical to submit your solutions to this section. During the tutorial session of the week following the practical the solution to the problem will be presented and discussed.
The last set of questions are the application questions. These will be longer paragraph/essay questions which will require you to apply the models to real-world conservation and research scenarios. You will be required to reference in these practicals so please make sure that you know how to use Google Scholar, Web of Science and/or Scopus. Please also make sure that you have installed and know how to use some kind of bibliographic management software such as EndNote from the UKZN software repository or Mendely.
Please submit your answers to these questions in a Word document by 13:45 on the day of the following practical.