CATALST eCOTS Workshop

Laura Le, Rebekah Isaak, and Laura Ziegler–Iron Chefs of Randomization

Rebekah Isaak, Laura Le, and Laura Ziegler conducted a virtual, interactive workshop on May 17, 2012 as part of the first Electronic Conference on Teaching Statistics (eCOTS) (http://www.causeweb.org/ecots/). Registration for the workshop filled in record time and over 30 participants from across the country and around the world attended. A recording of the workshop will be available on the CAUSEweb site (http://www.causeweb.org) in the near future.

The workshop, entitled A Flavor of the CATALST Course: Using Randomization-Based Methods in an Introductory Statistics Course, gave participants an overview of the CATALST course (http://www.tc.umn.edu/~catalst/) and introduced them to various components of this course. The topics covered range from a radically different first day activity, the iPod Shuffle Model Eliciting Activity, to the types of assessments used in the course. Participants were left unmuted for the duration of the workshop in order to foster the interactive nature of the course. This resulted in lively discussion and many of the participants spoke up with insightful comments and good questions.

In addition to the information Rebekah, Laura, and Laura shared based on their experiences teaching the CATALST course, Joe Nowakowski and Sheila Weaver shared their reflections on teaching the course for the first time this spring. They talked about their concerns going into teaching the course, what it was like to teach it for the first time, what they liked about it, challenges they encountered, and recommendations for anyone interested in teaching it.