Pierre Lafaye de Micheaux and Jakub Stoklosa
Abstract:
In this seminar the speakers will explain the process of 'digitally uplifting' an undergraduate statistics course. As a proof of concept, they will illustrate this process through their work this year on MATH1041 (Statistics for Life and Social Sciences), a first-year introductory statistics course intended for a large cohort of students from various disciplines.
Speaker
Research Area
Affiliation
School of Mathematics and Statistics, UNSW Sydney
Date
Thu, 25/10/2018 - 2:00pm
Venue
RC-1040 , The Red Centre, UNSW (Note this has changed from the originally advertised room. RC-1040 is on level 1 of the centre wing of the Red Centre building.)
They built a new RMarkdown-based package called MATHxxxx to ease the creation of lecture slides that incorporate, among other things, visual clues for students and reproducible R codes within the lecture slides. They used this package to redesign the existing set of slides for MATH1041 in order to make them more attractive to students and to help functionality, flexibility and adaptability for the lecturer. They designed RShiny online interactive applets to help students better understand various statistical concepts. They created case study videos to consolidate how the statistical topics are tied to real-life context. They also created a concept map to visualise the principal concepts covered in the course and how they link to each other as a support tool for students. Some of these tools can be reused to digitally enhance other applied statistics courses.
The remainder of this seminar is intended for an open discussion on how we can improve student engagement and boost class attendance.