Serina Haddad transcript

My name is Serina Haddad. I’ve been teaching stats for over 14 years, and I teach at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.

One of the biggest challenges that we face as educators is students’ anxiety. Research shows that students come to stats classrooms geared with anxiety, which becomes like, turns into a cycle of self-doubt and affects their performance. And to address that, we really need to show the relevance. We need to show how simple the content is and how it connects with like, day-to-day things that they go through.

Using technology has shown to really improve that anxiety, and it also improves engagement. I’ve been assigning MyLab assignments, homeworks, exams, and quizzes for over ten years now, and I’ve noticed that when I break assignments into smaller chunks, it really helps with students’ anxiety and keeps them more engaged.

With the rapid developments in AI and all the data analysis tools, it’s become really important for us as educators to adopt that lifelong learning and show students how to use AI and embed it in our curriculum. And with that, of course, comes the ethics involved and the importance of not to over rely on AI and how to avoid bias when using AI tools.

I think Pearson is doing a fantastic job keeping up with technology and building all these like AI tools to help instructors and students. The fact that now students are able to practice with, like, a customizable study plan and are able to see their strengths and weaknesses when they work with problems, is an amazing way of using AI for learning.

For me, Excel is a foundational tool for classroom instruction. Excel is widely used now for business analytics, and it’s inexpensive. And students see how extendable it is in their jobs, in their internships, and in their other courses. And that keeps them engaged throughout the classroom learning experience.

Excel goes beyond basic formulas. It allows data manipulation and data management through pivot tables, and that actually shows students how it applies in the real world. So having used Excel in the classroom for many years and seeing how successful it is, I’ve brought it in the fourth edition of the textbook. I’ve created customizable Excel files that instructors can download and use for their classroom instruction.

Experiential learning is increasingly essential in business stats. It’s very important to show students how to work with real-life data and connect the theory they learn with practice. I love using MyLab Stats, that allows me to assign problems with Excel files that students get to download and work on and experiment with, and that helps them make mistakes and learn from them.

The experiential learning allows students to see beyond the numbers. It allows students to see why. Why did I get this? And it develops those critical-thinking and problem-solving skills as they experiment with numbers.

There is a clear shift from computation to actually interpretation. Given that the software now does most of the calculations for us, it is important for us to show students the importance of interpretation and storytelling. And what are the numbers telling us? So, I tell them, “One in five students actually have a bachelor’s degree in business. What makes you compete?”

When I use these statistics, it’s eye-opening for students when I tell them, “What is your competitive advantage?” If you want to compete with one out of five people applying for that job, it is very important to become data literate and develop data proficiency and data analytics skills. One of the important trends is for students to see how statistics applies in the real world, and the feature in the fourth edition of the textbook, the Focus on Analytics, shows students how statistics applies in data analytics and business analytics, and shows them a real-life setting on how stats is applied.