A case study of R in public affairs education: Effective use in hybrid and asynchronous online statistics courses

Abstract

The general growth in public affairs programs offering hybrid and online courses to reach a wide variety of students, along with the necessity of doing so during a global health pandemic, calls for an investigation of best practices in teaching public affairs statistics and research-oriented courses. These courses often require the use of a statistics software program. I describe my use of R with the R Commander package that turns the R interface into a graphical user interface (GUI) similar to other, commonly used software programs. I detail my experience using this software through a case study utilizing two different pedagogical techniques. I find that the use of instructor-generated video tutorials of the R Commander software program allows hybrid and online students to effectively learn statistics concepts in a similar manner and as effectively as students in traditional, in-person courses.

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