Technology Innovations in Statistics Education

Open-ended assignments - such as lab reports and semester-long projects - provide data science and statistics students with opportunities for developing communication, critical thinking, and creativity skills. However, providing grades and qualitative feedback to open-ended assignments can be very time consuming and difficult to do consistently across students. In this paper, we discuss the steps of a typical grading workflow and highlight which steps can be automated in an approach that we define as an automated grading workflow. We illustrate how gradetools, a new R package, implements this approach within RStudio to facilitate efficient and consistent grading while providing individualized feedback. We hope that this work will help the community of data science and statistics educators use gradetools as their grading workflow assistant or develop their own tools for assisting their grading workflow.

This article is about the two conflicting goals when teaching statistics or data science courses based on real-world data in a business school environment. We propose to look at structured socio-economic data about the Canadian economy. Canada was ranked 8th in 2017 by Open Data Watch (Government of Canada) for its data accessibility policy. Statistics Canada offers several ways to access data across its over 11,000 data tables. We built an R package to ease access to Statistics Canada's open economic data. With this package, we offer students another option to collect data about the Canadian economy.