Editing Statistics and Statistical Programming (Winter 2021) (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 in Discord on the "Classroom Voice" channel on the course Discord. These are scheduled to run for a maximum of 110 minutes. I plan to use the entire time.

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''' over Discord whenever possible. Doing so will give me time to sift, sort, and organize your questions into a plan for each class session that is tailored to the specific concerns you have encountered in the material. Obviously, 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:
* I plan to record the course meetings and have them available to class participants in an access-control-restricted fashion. Please get in touch if you have concerns or requests about this. 
* I will do my 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 plan to '''randomly call on students''' to share and discuss their solutions to selected textbook exercises or problem set questions during class. 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.

Although the day-to-day routine will vary, class session will include some combination of the following:

* Quick updates about assignments, projects, and meta-discussion about the class.
* Discussion of '''programming challenges''' due that day (and related to the previous week's R lecture materials).
* Discussion of  '''statistics questions''' related to new material in we've covered.
<!--* Discussion of any exemplary empirical paper we have read and the '''empirical paper questions'''. -->