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

For March 2021 issue of AMS (American Mathematical Society) Notices, I wrote a short piece for the Early Career section. Here are a few points I make: When I started teaching after PhD, I started using open-access books such as OpenIntro in my classes because textbooks are extremely expensive. Now I am co-writing an open-access book myself. Finding a community of support was extremely important for me. I am glad to have found R Ladies. I use R Markdown for creating open education materials. I learned a lot more on accessibility and am still learning since I now share my work with a wider audi ..read more

In a previous blog post, I had mentioned the reasons why I take a longer route for recording and editing videos. In this post, I will explain my editing process step-by-step using Premiere Pro. Note that some of what I say should be applicable in other editing software as well. You will notice that the video is rather long. That’s mainly because I am talking about what I am doing. When it comes to editing it takes much less time with muscle memory gained over time. No matching items ..read more

Over the summer as we were getting ready for yet another term of remote teaching, we recorded a video on recording and editing lecture videos which we did not get to publish until now. We thought it is better late than never and are publishing it now. Instructors can consider to use video editing techniques to improve their pre-recorded lectures, and this is why we had asynchronous classes in mind when writing this post. Pros and Cons of asynchronous lectures Pre-recording provides instructors with greater control on the content and on the delivery of their lectures. In light of this greater ..read more

I now have taught at UC Irvine for five academic terms and three of these terms we were remote teaching. Our academic calendar is on a quarter-system so in March 2020 we started our Spring quarter completely remote. I also taught courses in the summer and am just finishing am teaching my Fall courses. During this time, I have taught my courses completely asynchronously by recording lecture videos. I have changed my workflow quite a bit since I first started. In this post, I will focus on what I have changed and why I have changed it. Recording camera and screen simultaneously I would not consi ..read more