New online course presents statistics for 'mere mortals'
Lloyd Rieber will again be offering a massive open online course (MOOC) on the topic of statistics in education. This free course will run Feb. 8-March 14 and you may sign up on Canvas.net.
He’s also made a short three-minute “mash-up” of a selection of course videos to give you a taste of the course. This MOOC is especially valuable for new or first-year doctoral students who would like a friendly, low-stakes introduction to some basic statistics as a way to help them prepare to take ERSH courses. Faculty are encouraged to alert their doctoral students about this opportunity.
Rieber designed this course for “mere mortals,” meaning that he designed it for people who want to know about and use statistics as an important tool in their work, but who are not-and don’t want to be-mathematicians or statisticians. All interested College of Education faculty, staff, and students are invited to check it out.
Here’s the approach: “I provide a short presentation or two on each statistics topic, followed by a video tutorial where you build an Excel spreadsheet from scratch to compute the statistic. Then, I ask you to take a short quiz-consisting of sometimes just one question-where I ask you to plug in some new data into your spreadsheet and then copy and paste one of your new calculations as your answer. (And yes, there is also a short final exam at the end on the conceptual stuff).”
Examples of specific skills to be learned include the scales of measurement, measures of central tendency, measures of variability, and the computation of the following: mean, median, and mode; standard deviation; z (standard) scores; Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient (r); correlated-samples t test (i.e. dependent t test); independent-samples t test; and a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA).