Faculty Spotlight - Dr. Whitney Zimmerman

I first became interested in online education about 16 years ago when I took my first online course. Throughout college and graduate school, I supplemented my on-campus coursework with online courses. As a graduate student at Penn State, University Park, I concurrently completed World Campus’ Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Distance Education and MEd in Adult Education; my Master’s Paper was titled Best Practices in Online Statistics Education: A Review of Literature. When I finished my PhD in Educational Psychology, there was an opening in the Department of Statistics that just seemed to be a perfect fit!

I really enjoy designing new learning materials. This is where I feel like I can apply a lot of the educational psychology concepts I learned in graduate school. For example, I have been producing long video lectures for STAT 200 which are based on adult learning theory and multimedia learning principles.

STAT 200 is designed to encourage students to learn by doing. Each weekly lesson has a WileyPLUS assignment with unlimited attempts, an open-note quiz with two attempts, and a lab assignment that usually requires the use of Minitab Express or StatKey.

I would advise students to think about how they learn best and to make a plan each week that takes into account their learning preferences and their schedule. It’s best to start each lesson early in the week. There is a lot of educational research that supports distributed practice (i.e., learning over a longer period of time as opposed to cramming in one session). Plus, if a student faces any technical difficulties or unanticipated challenges, there will be sufficient time to address them with the instructor.

I would describe most of the very successful STAT 200 students as highly self-regulated learners. This means that they think about how they are learning. They plan ahead, they monitor their progress, and they reflect so they are always improving their study strategies.