Statistics in Education for Mere Mortals: MOOC begins Monday

This is a special invitation to new and current doctoral students to enroll.

I will again be offering a MOOC (massive open online course) on the topic of statistics in education. The MOOC will run July 11–Aug. 15 on Canvas.net. Use this link to sign up.

The course is free.

I made a three-minute mash-up of a selection of the course’s videos to give people a taste of the course.

I think 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 for ERSH courses. So, I hope faculty will alert their doctoral students about this opportunity. (The timing of this section is particularly good for newly admitted doctoral students about to begin their studies).

I designed the course for “mere mortals,” meaning that I designed it for people who want to know more about and use statistics as an important tool in their work, but who are not—and don’t want to be—mathematicians or statisticians. I invite all interested College faculty, staff, and students to check it out.

Here’s my 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, you will take a short quiz, consisting of sometimes one question asking 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
  • The computation of the following: mean, mode, and median; 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)

Also, all of the course videos are available on YouTube (I also have a playlist). This will be the eighth time I will have taught this free online course. More than 5,400 people worldwide have enrolled in it to date. The course is scheduled to be offered next in February. The plan is to offer it twice a year.

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