Teaching

Applied statistics and statistical computing — mostly for students who’ll use it in another field.

Applied statistics and statistical computing at the University of the Fraser Valley — introductory courses through applied GLMs and survival analysis, taught with R and reproducible workflows.

I teach across the introductory-to-advanced range at the University of the Fraser Valley, and have taught at Langara College and the University of British Columbia. Much of it is service teaching — statistics for students in the sciences, health sciences, business, and social sciences — where the goal is for students to run and interpret their own analyses, not just pass an exam.

At UFV

Courses

Course Topic Software
STAT 104 Introductory statistics Minitab
STAT 106 Statistics for business & social science Minitab/R
STAT 270 Introduction to probability & statistics R
STAT 315 Intermediate statistics R
STAT 402 Applied GLMs & survival analysis R

How I teach it

Approach

I lean on real data and reproducible workflows — R in Jupyter notebooks and RStudio — so students leave with a habit they can carry into a thesis, a lab, or a job, not just a set of formulas. Course materials and solution keys are written in LaTeX for clarity, and computing is woven through the course rather than bolted on at the end.

Professional development

Keeping the toolkit current

Statistical practice moves, and I train to stay with it. Recent professional development includes workshops and courses in:

  • Analyzing Large Datasets with the Julia Language
  • Version Control with Git and GitHub
  • Modular Design and Automated Testing with R
  • Introduction to Big Data & Machine Learning for Survey Researchers & Social Scientists
  • Advanced Visualization in R: R Shiny
  • Introduction to Effective Visualization
  • Introduction to Discrete Choice Modeling in R
  • Introduction to Statistical Machine Learning in R
  • Data Science and Analytics: Introduction to Data Cleaning, Querying, and Modelling at Scale
  • Open Source Solutions for Online Teaching, Assessment and Grading
  • Exploratory Data Analysis using R Markdown
  • Instructional Skills Workshop (ISW)