| Project Title | Developing Open Access Biometrics Course Materials to Enhance Statistical Learning Capacity and Interactive Assessment Tool |
| Principal Investigator | Suborna Ahmed |
| Co-Applicants | Vaniartha Vaniartha, 3rd year Undergraduate student, Natural Resources Conservation, Faculty of Forestry Stella Britwum Acquah, PhD Candidate in Forest Biometrics, Forest Resources Management, Faculty of Forestry |
| Faculty | Forestry |
| Funding Year | 2021 |
| Project Summary | The Introduction to Biometrics course (FRST 231 98A Distance Education) is designed for second-year undergraduate students from the Faculty of Forestry, Land and Food Systems, and related fields. This course is particularly aimed at those who need an introductory applied statistics course with examples related to forestry and biology. Access Studies and prospective students interested in pursuing UBC professional degrees also frequently take this course to improve their academic background in quantitative analysis methods. Finally, this course provides students with skills to perform well in their upper-level quantitative analysis courses as they learn to effectively identify and apply statistical techniques to summarize and analyze data. The learning outcomes from this course include understanding and applying fundamental theories of probability and statistics, sampling distribution, methods of estimation and hypothesis testing, the goodness of fit and tests for independence, analysis of variance, regression, and correlation. We emphasized interpretation of the analysis results to make informed decisions. Students need to solve statistical problems based on the data provided and apply appropriate methods in statistics. This course’s learning activities include contributing to the discussion page, replying to each other’s posts, and answering quizzes that are associated with textbook chapters and lessons. To apply the statistical methodology appropriately in real-life datasets, students need to practice various problem sets. However, there are not many worked-out examples available for students in the textbook and course lessons for the above-mentioned topics. The OER project will allow us to make an adequate number of worked-out examples with detailed explanations of the procedure, along with quiz questions that will allow students to apply their learned techniques and self-evaluate themselves. We aim to create OER materials for two feasible topics of the course content in this pilot project and test the learning effectiveness at a small scale. The open educational resources will create a flexible learning opportunity for students in the course to engage in learning activities at their own pace. We hope that these open problem sets on UBC Wiki will help students solve various statistical problems accurately and improve their performance in the course assessment. OERs on UBC Wiki will give students exposure to different ways of learning and assessing their application capacity independently. These OER biometrics materials will allow free access for students in other disciplines and international students in the 3+2 transfer program in the Faculty of Forestry. |
| Grant type | OER Rapid Innovation |
| Funded Amount | $2,000 |
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