Virtual Academy (VA)

The Advancing Data in Corrections initiative includes a Virtual Academy, which builds data literacy and analytic capabilities within departments of corrections (DOCs) nationwide to further data-informed planning and decision-making. Through their participation in the Virtual Academy, corrections agency staff can access the program’s self-paced learning materials, community forum, peer-to-peer networks, and technical assistance at no cost.

The CSG Justice Center’s work on the Virtual Academy is funded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA). BJA is a component of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs.

The program is guided by the Virtual Academy Correctional Research Leaders Advisory Council, a group of five leaders in the field of corrections research and data analytics.

Virtual Academy homepage on CSG Website

Online Courses

Corrections analysts will be able to take the Virtual Academy self-guided online courses, accessible from any computer with an internet connection, to expand existing skill sets across a range of relevant topics.

Introduction to R

Intro to R Syllabus

This course focuses on teaching you the basic skills and concepts you will need to use the R statistical programming language for working with data and running reproducible analysis. The R language is a powerful and flexible tool used for data analysis, data visualization, and statistics. Further, as an open-source tool, it frees you from the challenges of software licensing, black box technologies, and opaque cost structures. Yet, as with many programming languages, the initial learning curve can be a little steep and somewhat daunting.

The aim of this course is not to make you an expert in R—that path is longer than we can cover in a single course. Rather, our intent with this course is to help you get over the initial climb and provide you with the basic skills and experience to work with the R programming language, ask the right questions, and manipulate data to conduct basic exploratory data analysis and visualization.

Because learning programming in any language is not a spectator sport, this course is very hands-on. With each lesson, participants will be presented with data, R code, and instruction on how to use R to analyze the data. We will cover how to ingest, manipulate, summarize, and visualize data. Additionally, the course will cover the basics of setting up an R project for reproducibility by emphasizing rules, best practices, and frameworks for combining code with prose commentary.

Assigned Research Staff

Working on this course:
Matt Herman
Martha Eichlersmith

SharePoint folder

JC Research/Documents/VA

va
├── background
│   ├── ...
│   ├── lms_courses
│   │   ├── ...
│   │   ├── intro to R 
│   │   └── ...
│   └── ...
├── data
└── products

Repository

va_modelcode: gives corrections analysts access to a variety of code templates written in the R statistical programming language to improve data analytic efficiency and accuracy.
va_data: repository that hosts data used in model code, case studies, and lessons.
va_casestudy: data and code for case study completed during the VA Conference in August 2024.

Branches

main                  # production branch 
└── develop           # development branch 
    ├── task-branch1  # working task branch 
    └── task-branch2  # working task branch 

Folder structure

<Information about folders and files in repo>

va_course_intro_r
├── lesson##          # each lesson has a specific folder 
|   ├── lesson##.qmd  # qmd file wtih text/code  
|   └── ...           # any other files/folders required
├── ...  
├── README.md
└── va_course_intro_r.Rproj

Data

va_data: repository that hosts data used in model code, case studies, and lessons.