Re: st: advice on using Stata in an undergraduate Intro Stats course

[Marcello Pagano <pagano@hsph.harvard.edu>]

We have just finished teaching an on-line version of such a course with 
edX. We were very much interested in active learning, fully believing 
that we are autodidacts. Something like 55,000 or more registered, and 
28,000 or so attempted at least one question (it was a 12 week course 
with home works every week, so that means that many attempted at least 
one of the homework questions.) StataCorp helped us make Stata available 
to these students.  About 8,000 completed the final exam. I think Stata 
was a reason for that many completing the course. We were told to expect 
about 2 to 5% completion. This almost 30% completion is amazing.

I think you can still register for the course (edx.org), for free, of 
course, to see all the materials--syllabus, lectures, homeworks, 
readings etc.... Strip off the epidemiology (or use it to motivate your 
students) and you are still left with a full course in biostatistics. 
The life/health science students, even undergraduate, prefer this to 
pure statistics.

Take a look.  Might find some useful stuff there.

m.p.


On 1/23/2013 1:02 PM, Doug Hess wrote:
> Happy New Year to all on the list-serv.
>
> I will be teaching a basic "Intro Stats" course to undergrads in the
> next academic year. The students are at a highly selective liberal
> arts college (mostly second and third-year students). It is not math
> intensive (students with better math preparation or who are math
> majors take a higher-level series of statistics courses) and it is
> largely for students in political science, sociology, and psychology
> who take it as a requirement (maybe some economics students, too). To
> put it another way, the course goes up to and includes a week or two
> (at most) on multivariate regression.
>
> Some questions for those with teaching experience:
>
> 1) Have you found--or do you believe that--it is useful to have
> students learn a bit of Stata for this sort of course? (The college
> has a campus license.)
>
> 2) Are there textbooks (or on-line books/websites) that use Stata for
> a beginners intro to statistics (and/or probability)? I.e., not just
> intro to Stata, but intro to Stata for learning stats from the
> starting square? (The difference between two such books/websites could
> be the order in which material is introduced, the complexity of the
> problems or examples, assumptions of previous knowledge, etc.)
>
> 3) Anybody care to share syllabi for this sort of course (using Stata,
> or not)? [Please respond off line by emailing me directly if you want
> to send a file, of course.]
>
> Thank you for any thoughts.
>
>
> Douglas R. Hess, PhD
> Washington, DC
> douglasrhess@gmail.com
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