I often hear variations of this statement at the beginning of each semester. Writing is not something students tend to associate with statistics, nor is it something that most stats faculty members have been formally trained to teach. However, the ability to create and critique written communication involving data and statistics is becoming increasingly important.... Continue Reading →
Ooh, Shiny!: R Shiny apps as a teaching tool
Interactive web applications (or apps), such as the Rossman-Chance collection, are popular tools for teaching statistics because they help illustrate fundamental concepts such as randomness, sampling, and variability through dynamic visualizations. The StatKey collection of apps created for the Lock5 textbook series to demonstrate and perform simulation-based inference is another example1. Historically, despite the utility... Continue Reading →
Tips and Tricks for Online Courses: A Q&A with Instructional Designers
In the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota, we have a group called the Office of e-Learning Services (ELS) that works closely with instructors who teach fully online. The model we use here is working collaboratively and often with instructional designers in ELS to design our online courses. We (the instructors) are... Continue Reading →
Making Awesome Tables and Figures Using Gestalt Principles
It was late October in Minnesota, a perfect time for a swim in a local lake! At least, so thought a biology professor at our university (I’ll call him Dr. Doe). This chilly excursion dislodged an idea in his mind: what is the relationship between the body temperature recovery at different areas of the body... Continue Reading →
Reflections from using Collaborations in a Synchronous Virtual Format
I, maybe like many of you, have been reflecting on what teaching methods worked and what did not work during COVID teaching this last year. In particular, I have been thinking about what tools and strategies I learned/used that I would continue to use after we go back to in-person teaching. Many faculty had to... Continue Reading →
Specifications-Grading: An Example
Sometimes Specifications-Grading (Nilson, 2015) can feel like cooking – I may have all the ingredients, but it doesn’t mean I can turn it into an edible product. Bouncing ideas off other colleagues has been extremely beneficial. In this post, I will discuss an implementation I used for an intermediate statistics course. Setting up the Hurdles... Continue Reading →