Editing Statistics and Statistical Programming (Fall 2020) (section)

====Synchronous elements of the course====

The synchronous elements of the course will be the two weekly class meetings that will happen via video conference (Zoom). These are scheduled to run for a maximum of 110 minutes. Each session will include multiple short breaks. 

We will use the class meetings to discuss and work through any questions or challenges you encounter in the materials assigned for that day. This means that I encourage you to identify, submit, and discuss questions about the material '''before each class meeting''' whenever possible. Doing so will give the teaching team time to sift, sort, and organize the questions into a hopefully-cohesive plan for each class session that is tailored to the specific concerns you encounter in the material. Obviously, we anticipate that questions will arise during the class sessions too as well and we'll do our best to adapt as we go.

A couple of other notes about the synchronous course meetings:
* Aaron plans to record the course meetings and have them available to class participants only via Zoom/Canvas. Please get in touch if you have concerns or requests about this. 
* The teaching team will do our best to notice and respond to any questions or comments that come up via Discord or Zoom during the class. Please do what you can to support these efforts.
* You might want to create/acquire something like [https://www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/news/articles/2020/08/back-to-school-hack-shares-students-handwritten-work-and-teacher-response-in-real-time.html NU Mechanical Engineering Professor Michael Peshkin's homebrew document camera] to facilitate sharing hand-written notes/drawings during class.

In addition, because randomness is extremely important in statistics, I may occasionally '''randomly assign''' different working groups to share and discuss their solutions to selected textbook exercises or problem set questions during class. These random assignments will be announced ahead of time so that the group has an opportunity to prepare. The idea here is to structure some participation in the synchronous sessions to ensure an equitable distribution of the responsibility to discuss questions, answers, points of confusion, and alternatives.