In the last few years, I have been working with my students Federica Zoe Ricci and Catalina Medina on developing the R package gradetools. I have realized that I have never mentioned this package on this blog. We developed the package to grade and provide feedback on assignments that are open-ended and where feedback cannot be provided by autograders (at least yet). gradetools aims to do two major things: Automate the grading workflow not the feedback. Minimize switching between different interfaces (grade book, student’s work, GitHub etc.) I thought I would share a few resources about the p ..read more

Background If you, like me, always feel behind in everything especially when it comes to catching on the newest trends in education, you might also possibly been stressed about catching up on AI in the classroom. To change that I dedicated my Spring quarter catching up on learning about AI in the classroom. I tried to attend every event at the intersection of statistics + AI + education that fit my schedule and tried to read as much as possible. I am not an expert on the use of generative AI but as a learner, I want to share a few resources that I found helpful. In addition I will share my pla ..read more

This week, I had the privilege of visiting Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland to give a talk. In addition to tasting the delicious Finnish water and seeing the beautiful Aalto campus, I was very happy to meet Aki Vehtari and his research group members. In this blog post I want to summarize the points I made during my talk. I first share my own Bayesian journey and then my updated beliefs. Aki and I in front of the Computer Science Building My Own Bayesian Journey In a few weeks, I will become an “Associate Professor of Teaching”. For this talk, I wanted to share my own Bayesian journey an ..read more

In this short blog post I want to share a resource that can be helpful for community college students in California (and beyond) and their instructors in supporting students to transfer to four-year colleges. Through my work as Vice Chair of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Statistics at University of California Irvine, from time to time I get to work with community college instructors. One of the questions I get asked frequently from instructors is what courses they should offer, especially when preparing students to transfer to four-year data science programs. Ever since I started ..read more

Background I serve as the Vice Chair of undergraduate studies in my department and I oversee our Bachelor of Science in Data Science program. Due to my role, I often get asked to give talks targeted at undergraduate students studying statistics and data science. During these talks, and through questions I get asked, I share a few recommendations and opportunities with students on a regular basis. I wanted to summarize a few of these in this blog post. This is mainly targeted towards US-based students but some tips may apply to other students around the globe. Making the Most of Undergraduate Y ..read more

I have been fortunate enough to be funded by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health for my projects. When I finished graduate school, I had almost no training in grant writing and was not aware that non-methodological projects would also be funded. Now I enjoy the grant writing process very much as it helps me plan my future goals and structure my specific research interests. I had simply started by Googling about writing grants. In this blog post, I want to share a few tips that I did not see mentioned enough. I hope this post will supplement the resources out there ..read more

Background I have been invited to give a talk on statistics and data science education research as part of the Preparing to Teach Workshop. The workshop is designed for graduate students, postdoc scholars, and early career professors who are interested in teaching-focused positions in academia. In this post, I will share and expand on some of the points I made in my talk. Finding Collaborators If you are taking small steps in statistics education research and do not know many researchers at a personal level personally, do not worry. With time you can build these relations and find collaborator ..read more

Background In this blog post I would like to demystify the recommendation letter process for students and instructors. If you are a college student who wants to gain some background information on how recommendation letters work and how to ask your professors to write you one, then this blog post might be helpful. If you are a newish instructor who does not know how to handle recommendation letter requests or how to write one, then this blog post might also be helpful to you. You can also feel free to share this with your students. I split the tips for students and instructors into two, but I ..read more

Alicia Johnson, Miles Ott, and I have recently finished writing our textbook Bayes Rules! using bookdown. Fellow bookdown authors have asked us questions on styling book as they are writing their book. Through this blog post, I hope to answer their questions (mostly on styling) and share some tips. This blog post is not intended to introduce CSS or LaTeX or bookdown. However, most likely you may end up here if you have been searching certain questions related to bookdown with gitbook and/or pdf output. If you prefer looking at code rather than reading blog posts, then here is a demo repo of th ..read more

With higher course enrollments in data science courses, there is more grading to do and less time to provide meaningful feedback. Also, active learning activities often involve the use of additional formative assessment, like short quizzes, that instructors may be hesitant to introduce due to the need of then devoting time/resources to grade them. In this blog post, we will present some of the features thanks to which Gradescope , an AI-assisted tool, allowed us to increase efficiency and fairness in grading. We will cover: how Gradescope can make grading easier how it can increase the qualit ..read more