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Course Spotlight Series: Data Analysis and Statistical Inference, started March 2, led by Dr. Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel of Duke University. This article, based on an interview with the instructor, was written by Charlie Chung of Class Central. |
Statistics and data analysis is a hot field, and “Data Scientist” has been called the sexiest job of the 21st Century. Dr. Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel is an Assistant Professor of the Practice in the department of Statistical Science, and is teaching Data Analysis and Statistical Inference, which has had over 220,000 enrollments. Mine attributes the surge in interest in statistics to the dramatic increase in the availability of data.
Originally from Turkey, Mine was surprised to find that most students in the U.S., as well as in most other parts of the world, are not exposed to stats very much in high school, and she developed a passion for improving statistics education. When Mine started to design her online course and thought about how she would arrange her content into modules, it forced her to re-think her instructional approach completely:
As a result, Mine was able to connect all of her content and assessment questions directly to the learning objectives for the course. She carried this over into her on-campus course so that her Duke campus students could also benefit from this. There is also a project in the course where students choose their own data set and perform their own analysis–because the stats is just part of being a data analyst:
Thus, a good data analyst needs to be able to form an argument, apply analysis to back it up, and then craft a compelling story. For this reason Duke set up the Specialization Reasoning, Data Analysis, and Writing. In addition to Mine’s course, it also includes Think Again: How to Reason and Argue, and English Composition I: Achieving Expertise, and a final Capstone Project. Read the full version of this article on Class Central’s blog. |