Curriculum Planning for Statistics

Funding was requested to support a cross-faculty curriculum development process that would result in a comprehensive project plan and proposal to be submitted in a future FL/TLEF funding cycle. This was a collaborative initiative involving the Faculties of Science, Arts, and Applied Science. The resulting FL project plan proposed the development, adaptation, and use of instructional resources that would address conceptually challenging topics in introductory statistics. The resources were to be open, adaptable, consistent in look and feel, and grounded in existing research on learning and statistics. The plan also proposed the development, testing and documentation of a model for cross-faculty partnership to support introductory statistics instruction, and a resulting increase in UBC’s faculty-level capacity for identifying, evaluating, adapting and/or developing future statistics learning resources. The proposed learning resources were to encompass a collection of modular, on-line content including: animations, mini-lecture screen-capture videos or pencasts, online homework and quizzes, individualized online experiments, a repository of interesting data sets, and in-class active learning (clicker questions and activities).

Nancy Heckman, Professor, Statistics
Leslie Burkholder, Senior Instructor, Philosophy
Doug Bonn, Professor, Physics and Astronomy
Fred Cutler, Associate Professor, Political Science
Bruce Dunham, Senior Instructor, Statistics
Paul Gustafson, Professor / Acting Head, Statistics
Joss Ives, Instructor, Physics and Astronomy
Melissa Lee, Lecturer, Statistics
Mike Marin, Instructor, School of Population and Public Health
Andrew Owen, Assistant Professor, Political Science
Eugenia Yu, Instructor, Statistics
Diana Whistler, Research Associate / Sessional Lecturer, Economics
Michael Whitlock, Professor, Zoology

Participants:

Noureddine Elouazizi, Strategist, Teaching and Learning Technologies, Science Centre for Learning and Teaching
Erin Fields, Flexible Learning Liaison, UBC Library
Gillian Gerhard, Science Faculty Liaison, Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology
Eric Jandciu, Strategist, Learning and Teaching Initiatives, Science Centre for Learning and Teaching

Products & achievements:

• Cross-campus curriculum development process - Team of 12 faculty members plus CTLT and Skylight staff met monthly to develop project plan and proposal.
• A content needs analysis and curation process and partnership model between the Statistics project team, Statistics Department, Faculty of Science and the UBC Library (http://wiki.ubc.ca/Library:STATS_Content_Curation_Project).
• Introductory Statistics Learning Object Evaluation Rubric (http://bit.ly/1O0Stg9).
• Identification of pedagogically grounded introductory statistics resource needs. This emerged from a resource curation process developed in partnership with the UBC Library.
• Identification of introductory statistics topics for exploration. Ranking of topics for resource development based on resource needs analysis. Identification of common learning objectives for top 2 identified topics.
• Successful proposal for Large TLEF grant, based on a cross-campus engagement among the Faculties of Arts, Science and Medicine. The proposal included a timeline, budget, evaluation plan and LT resource development plan for the collaborative development of modular, on-line materials suitable for adaptation and use in any UBC course or lab with an introductory statistics component.

Intended outcomes/themes: The intended outcome of this project (Phase 1) was a successful collaborative project proposal. Long term impacts will follow from the successfully funded project (Phase 2).

Dissemination: A poster was shared during the June 2014 Flexible Learning Open house at UBC. A link to the poster can be found here: http://flexible.learning.ubc.ca/news-events/fl-open-house-poster-session/