Drawing from web-based materials previously developed to supplement on-campus offerings of an introductory statistics course for graduate students in education, the author made an initial offering of an on-line virtual class in the fall of 2001. Poor student performance and dissatisfaction with this initial course organization led to a deeper reading of the literature on online teaching in general and the online teaching of statistics in particular. A much greater degree of instructor supplied organization, direction and interaction were incorporated into other offerings of the course during the fall and spring of 2003. Final examination scores and course evaluations improved markedly over the first online offering but remained somewhat lower and more variable than the results from on-campus offerings of the same course. Suggestions for improvements are offered based on instructor observations and student feedback.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education