- Location
- Virtual over Zoom
- Series/Type
- Biostatistics Seminar, DLSPH Event
- Dates
- March 22, 2022 from 3:00pm to 4:00pm
The Biostatistics Seminar Series presents:
“LearnR: A Tool for Interactive Lectures and Tutorials” by Dr. Lisa Avery, Princess Margaret Cancer Center
Abstract: As student numbers increased and funding per student decreased the amount of personalised attention devoted to undergraduate statistics students declined markedly over the 15 years leading into the Covid epidemic. Consequently, a plan was hatched to develop a suite of interactive tutorials for undergraduate biostatistics courses to facilitate more asynchronous learning. The goal was to free up some lecture time for more interesting and timely discussions of the practice of statistics, instead of focusing on the mechanics of the calculation. Ironically this work had just begun when the Covid pandemic hit in early 2020 and the project was sidelined due to time constraints. The past two years have highlighted the need for quality learning resources that can be accessed on demand to enable meaningful statistical practice for students. This idea is akin to the ‘flipped classroom’ where students are introduced to material outside of lecture and practice problem solving in lectures, but the idea here is to introduce and provide practice opportunities to free up lecturing time for deeper discussions of the methods and their applications. learnR is an R package built on the RShiny platform to create interactive tutorials using RMarkdown. This talk will present a brief overview of RShiny and the unique features of the learnR package. A brief discussion of workflow suggestions for lectures vs. interactive tutorials will be presented along with a template for developing course-specific tutorial packages.
For Dr. Avery’s biosketch, please see https://www.dlsph.utoronto.ca/faculty-profile/avery-lisa/
Register in advance for this seminar via
https://phesc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcvd-2urTwjGdy1cKpC1wzA5Mytm1ZVgTX9