This coming winter, I’ll be teaching a Quantitative Analysis course for the accelerated online MBA program at Marylhurst University. I last taught this course in Spring 2012 and really enjoyed it. I learned a lot from the experience — teaching online comes with unique challenges, and it’s good for me to have to manually calculate a few formulas again now and then. I believe my students learned quite a bit as well — particularly about how they might actually use some of the skills we covered in their real lives (as consumers and producers of analysis and research).
I especially enjoyed the connections we made between real world work and statistics in our discussions. We demystified central tendency, statistical significance, and confidence intervals (among other things) in the context of manufacturing process improvements and political polling (among other things). We’ll be using a new text in the winter, in large part due to student feedback, and I’m looking forward to another refresher for myself, and to new examples of the use, misuse, and importance of statistics in the business world.