Design, Development, and Evaluation of an Online Statistics Course for Educational Technology Doctoral Students: a Design and Development Case

The purpose of this design and development case is to document the design, development, and evaluation of a statistics course tailored for educational technology doctoral students in an online program. The course is intended to prepare online doctoral students to both consume and produce quantitative research in the field of educational technology using relevant and authentic learning experiences. This paper first outlined the course features used to engage students in the learning materials. Twenty doctoral students enrolled in this online statistics course provided relevant data on three occasions (pre-, mid-, and post-surveys) during a 16-week academic semester. Drawing from both quantitative and qualitative data sources, this paper demonstrates that the use of authentic and relevant datasets based on peer-reviewed publications from the field of educational technology coupled with engaging practice assignments, designed for students to exercise the use of various statistical techniques using SPSS, was a successful strategy. Students found learning about analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) along with factorial and repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) in the same module overwhelming. Results showed that students’ level of statistics anxiety significantly decreased in three key areas. The discussion provides interpretations of the findings as well as our lessons learned.