Teaching Statistics Online Using Excel

INTRODUCTION As anyone who has taught or taken a statistics course knows, statistical calculations can be tedious and error-prone, with the details of a calculation sometimes distracting students from understanding the larger concepts. Traditional statistics courses typically use scientific calculators, which can relieve some of the tedium and errors but provide little record for the student to study and/or submit. Mastering the calculator also involves a steep learning curve, especially for more complex statistical calculations. Excel, on the other hand, provides an excellent visual learning tool for statistics classes, from the introductory level focusing on descriptive statistics and graphs to the advanced statistics courses involving hypothesis testing, ANOVA, and multiple linear regression. This is especially the case for online statistics courses, since both student and instructor are already communicating solely via computer and most students have Excel software on their machines. From there it's just a matter of the student learning how to use Excel for statistical calculations, analyses, and graphs. This author has been teaching a wide variety of online statistics courses for several years now, and has developed a tutorial methodology that works quite well in the distance learning environment. Readers interesting in obtaining copies of the tutorials presented here can email the author at lawrence7000@msn.com for a Zip file. The same approach could work in traditional classrooms as well. Unlike the recent trend toward dynamic recorded tutorials and videos, this tutorial methodology relies on static tutorials presented directly in Excel, using graphs, instructional textboxes, arrows, numbered steps, formulas tied to cell references, screen shots of function dialog boxes, and Data Analysis Tools, with each tutorial tied directly to examples in the textbook. Thus, die student is able to see and compare both the textbook's approach and the Excel approach to solving the same problem, reinforcing the learning of both concepts and methodology. BASIC STATISTICAL TUTORIALS These tutorials are arranged by chapter, so each chapter will have a separate workbook with multiple worksheets - each worksheet devoted to a single computation method tied to a specific example in the chapter. Some chapter workbooks will be light, with only two or three worksheets, while others may contain six or more worksheet examples. The first worksheet typically contains an overview listing of the tutorials presented in the workbook, with worksheets named appropriately for easy reference. Figure 1 shows a typical Overview worksheet with corresponding worksheet tabs available for navigation. Figure 2 shows the first worksheet on the list in Figure 1 , providing details on how to use the Excel Data Analysis Histogram tool to create a frequency distribution table and histogram chart from raw data. Note that the Excel tutorial exactly parallels the example in the textbook [1], even to the five-column layout of the original data table - requiring specific instructions not to include labels because the data is not in a single column. The tutorial also includes instructions on how to bring up the Data Analysis tool pack and Histogram tool. This particular tutorial is aimed at Excel 2003 users and is slightly modified for Excel 2007 users who do not have a Tool menu and access the Data Analysis tool pack via the Data tab. In fact, almost all Excel tutorials will have to be done in two versions, Excel 2003 and Excel 2007, because of the vast differences in the user interfaces between the two versions - at least until all students have switched to Excel 2007. Of course, this version compatibility problem applies to this presentation and the Tutorials contained herein - and is an endemic problem with all online classes. It is not unusual in the online classroom environment to have assignments submitted in half a dozen different formats! …