Supercharging your quantitative online teaching
Thank you to those that joined us for the quantitative online teaching workshop back in October. If you couldn’t make it or found that it was fully booked not to worry, we’ve gathered all the recordings plus loads of extra resources so you can explore in your own time. There are tons of recommended tools, author videos, datasets, and much more.
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Distance learning keynote: Learning goals, interactive video and increasing students participation in a collaborative setting
Our keynote came from Douglas Fisher, author of The Distance Learning Playbook for College and University Instruction. Doug discussed using interactive video to improve students learning experience, the importance of learning goals and shared tips for aiding collaboration.
Interactive video tools:
Video takeaways
Use shared documents, create templates that act as a gallery walk would in the classroom. Students then work on the tasks collaboratively either synchronously or asynchronously.
Part of teachers instruction needs to include students interacting with each other and problem solving.
Guide their thinking. Use waterfall chats in synchronous sessions.
Deliberate practice makes the instruction stick.
“If we can get our students to interact with the video and not just passively assign it, we can get some better learning from them. ”
Breakout sessions
Engaging and motivating large student cohorts online
Breakout session highlights
If you can’t do synchronous delivery with a large cohort than give students a choice in what content is pre-recorded. It shows that you’re listening to them and you value their contributions.
Build engagement and excitement through gentle nudges. Bring a sense of fun. Share more about yourself with your students and encourage them to share.
Recognizing the difficulty when dealing with large cohorts.
Related resources
Essential Maths Skills for Exploring Social Science Data
Author videos, datasets, multiple choice and self-test questions and flashcard glossaries by Rhys Jones
Go Big Or Go Home! Large scale teaching of statistics
The “Go big or go home” blog is part of an ongoing project to build greater interactivity and engagement within large introductory statistics courses at the tertiary level.
Quantitative Social Science Data in R: An introduction
Brian Fogarty provides R exercises, datasets & case studies.
Students can answer questions to practice key numeracy skills that they will need in their studies. They can use it as a refresher or a space to check their understanding as they go through the module.
Andy Field Discovering Statistics Using IBM SPSS Statistics 5e
From initial theory through to regression, factor analysis and multilevel modelling, Andy Field animates statistics and SPSS software with his famously bizarre examples and activities.
Due to a technical difficulty we can’t provide the video for this breakout session
Teaching labs online, effective preparation and troubleshooting
Breakout session highlights
Troubleshooting in a virtual environment: How do we replicate the experience of being in the lab.
Set short assignments frequently so you can identify those students who need additional help.
Use interactive elements in the lab session: polls, raise your hand.
Related Resources
Mindmap created by Dr Iulia Cioroianu and breakout session attendees
Directories of Python Libraries
Explore resources for your students from Phillip Brooker’s new book Programming with Python for Social Scientists.
R Screencast Tutorials with Brian Fogarty
R screencast tutorials from Fogarty’s book Quantitative Social Science Data with R
Creating reproducible and reusable online teaching materials
Breakout session highlights.
Examples of how to integrate open and reproducible science into your teaching workflow.
Embed students in the process of knowledge creation and make them take ownership of the knowledge they create.
Sharing teaching materials online
Related Resources
Online community for teachers and students around the Introduction to New Statistics
FORRT Syllabus for open and reproducible science
FORRT has drawn on the expertise of more than 50 experts from its community to provide educators with a comprehensive but straightforward accessible didactic framework.
FORRT clusters is a result of a comprehensive literature review guided by educational, pedagogical and didactic considerations aiming at providing a pathway towards the incremental adoption of Open and Reproducible Science tenets into educators/scholars teaching and mentoring.
There are more than 700 resources submitted so far in our database.
What we learned from teaching bootcamps and summer schools online
Breakout session highlights
Providing structure before the bootcamp through interactive quizzes and pre-recorded tutorials.
Live coding sessions online and always referring back to research projects and research design.
Managing different skills levels of students.
Tools and materials to support your teaching
Throughout the workshop our speakers recommended tools they’d found to be useful when teaching online whether to add interactivity, create improved videos or run labs online. Our very own social science tools guru, Daniela Duca has put together a couple of blogs where you can find all the tools mentioned and more. Why not comment on the posts and let us know the tools that have helped you to enhance your students learning experience this year.
teaching materials for computational social science
Though GitHub was not specifically designed for academic use, it was designed for sharing and collaborating on software, code and complex text materials and provides a place to offer your own materials for others to “hack”. We’ve pulled together GitHub collection on teaching materials for computational social science. If you’re teaching computational social science why not add another resource or suggest edits via GitHub. You can find instructions on adding your GitHUb repo to the collection here. Don’t use GitHub? You can submit resources easily using this form. Browse the list of open teaching materials below.
Workshop panel discussion
We rounded off the workshop with a panel discussion with the breakout session leads and some great tips and tricks from attendees. Thanks to everyone who took part and stay tuned to hear more in the new year about how we’re planning keep these great conversations going through an engaged methods community.