Cases: Distance Statistics - Christine Armatas

Keywords
Learners’ needs; learning contexts; social dynamics online; online communication; undergraduate education

Using an online courseware management system to facilitate the use, at distance, of a complex statistical software package.

Click on the microphone to hear the entire case study or select relevant sections from the text below. [AUDIO TRANSCRIPT]

Christine Armatas is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology in the Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences. Based in Geelong her project as a 2003 Online Teaching and Learning Fellow focused on the unit she chairs, Research Methods in Psychology.

Research Methods in Psychology is taught both solely off campus and both on and off campus giving Christine a thorough perspective on the different experiences of local and distance learners. As she observes in her introduction to the project’s context and background, the largely different expectations and experiences of these learners approaching the same criteria from vastly different learning contexts leads to differences in performance and satisfaction for all concerned.

Anyone facing the challenges of teaching statistics to learners from an arts background, especially in terms of using statistical programs (here SPSS) at a distance, will sympathise with the challenges that Christine faced!

Using Deakin Studies Online (DSO) was for Christine primarily a support tool in using the SPSS statistical package. Christine talks about this and the social dynamics that she hoped to facilitate and replicate (moving from a short residential school to an online environment).

In this, naturally, communication tools played an important role. These strategies are covered by Christine (together with some statistics for beginners!) as well as the relative success of the use. Certainly an experience anyone looking at moving a subject similar to statistics to an online social learning environment should take interest in, especially in terms of patterns of learning in moving from paper-based to online learning.

And if you’ve ever experienced a ‘pragmatic’ approach to study and assessment then you will have shared many of Christine’s teaching experiences too.

“It’s a bit hard to get excited about hypothesis testing”

Christine then talks about where she is going to go in her redevelopment. Especially exciting is her direction of stepping back from traditional perspectives and introducing teaching and learning strategies befitting learners actual expectations and experiences.
Finally, “being a psychologist”, Christine has also been able to judge the relative success of this project, concluding that the pilot was ‘generally successful’, a conclusion which certainly builds interest in future developments in this course and Christine’s future projects.