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Showing posts from July, 2020

Reflections on a summer session

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The following is a look at the student and faculty evaluations from the summer online session. Student evaluations and responses Course evaluation Course evaluation The chart uses standardized mean values (also known as z-scores) to provide some insight into course strengths and weaknesses. A score of zero would mean that the question performed at the overall mean value. The x-axis is in standard deviations. Values beyond ±2 are considered unusual. The areas of relative strength were that courses were perceived to be a valuable learning experience and that course syllabi were clear and complete. None of these were unusually high. The area of strongest weakness was in perceived value of the online course versus the residential version of the course. This was unusually weak against the other averages. Word cloud for course comments There were over 400 comments made by students on their courses. By and large the comments were positive and supportive. Many students rep

Assessing Learning in Online Introductory Statistics

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On 16 March 2020 the spring term was brought to a sudden and abrupt end by a beta-coronavirus epidemic. After a couple weeks of future uncertainty I opted to begin preemptively working on delivering statistics online in the summer. By late April the college had made a decision to run only online classes in the summer. I knew I had to deliver the core outcomes for MS 150 Statistics in an online format, and that focus guided the course redesign. I also knew I had to design for students who might have nothing more than a smartphone. The course was already centered on Google Sheets as its statistical software, and the the Google Sheets app would make possible statistics on both Android and iOS. I was also guided by my own knowledge of the bandwidth limitations the students on home ADSL would face, especially on Kosrae island as Kosrae is connected to the Internet only by a fairly narrowband satellite. I knew that the only video which might be deliverable to Kosrae was YouTube. YouTube