Dear RG experts,
What are the benefits of ICT to Statistics as a course in higher institution of learning?
Thank you.
Oluwaseun
Dear Oluwaseun,
Thank you for your interesting question. I would differentiate between the use of statistical software and the use of ICT in statistics education. The former has been covered by the other answers. The latter is things like statstutor (http://www.statstutor.ac.uk), which uses an individual learning resources model, and CAST (http://cast.massey.ac.nz/collection_public.html), which uses an integrated e-book with simulations model. There is also the issue of statistics assessment using ICT. Such systems are currently in their infancy. Two systems available in the UK are DEWIS (http://dewisprod.uwe.ac.uk/) and Numbas (https://www.numbas.org.uk/).
In response to your question regarding the first kind of software I would personally say that the field of statistics has changed tremendously in the last 20-30 years but educators and the education system as a whole is generally (much) too slow in catching up. We are generally not preparing students adequately for employment because we are generally not allowing students to use statistical software in their assessments and we are not teaching them higher level thinking when using software, such as modelling and metacognition, except in dissertations, for which they are not well prepared or adequately assessed.
A number of tools have been developed to aid in statistical analysis. Application of ICT made it possible to carry out statistical analysis using ICT developed tools instead of the usual manual methods of achieving them. A typical example of such powerful statistical tool is R.
Dear Jumoke Soyemi, I really appreciate your concise contribution to the discussion.
Thank you for your time.
Oluwaseun
Main benefit that ICT provides in good learning of statistics is in large data handling, graphing, analysis, finding relationships among variables and inference etc. All these could be done manually as well but definitely nobody would like to spend so much time when the same could be done in few seconds without even writing any code e.g by using excel and SPSS.
But i am interested if u like to work out on a similar research study in this area of Statistics and ICT . You can count me as your collaborator.
Dear Oluwaseun,
Thank you for your interesting question. I would differentiate between the use of statistical software and the use of ICT in statistics education. The former has been covered by the other answers. The latter is things like statstutor (http://www.statstutor.ac.uk), which uses an individual learning resources model, and CAST (http://cast.massey.ac.nz/collection_public.html), which uses an integrated e-book with simulations model. There is also the issue of statistics assessment using ICT. Such systems are currently in their infancy. Two systems available in the UK are DEWIS (http://dewisprod.uwe.ac.uk/) and Numbas (https://www.numbas.org.uk/).
In response to your question regarding the first kind of software I would personally say that the field of statistics has changed tremendously in the last 20-30 years but educators and the education system as a whole is generally (much) too slow in catching up. We are generally not preparing students adequately for employment because we are generally not allowing students to use statistical software in their assessments and we are not teaching them higher level thinking when using software, such as modelling and metacognition, except in dissertations, for which they are not well prepared or adequately assessed.
Thank you for you Ikram-e-Khuda and Peter Samuels for your valuable contributions the discussion.
Oluwaseun
I really agreed with he stand of dear Peter Samuels on this discussion.
Thank you
Olutosin
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