Episode #2: Do university engineering schools teach statistical thinking to meet industry needs?

Do university engineering schools teach statistical thinking to meet industry needs?
Mia Stephens from JMP - SEFI podcast season 1 episode 2

For our second episode we welcome Mia Stephens, an Advisory Product Manager with JMP (pronounced jump), a corporate partner of SEFI, and part of SAS Institute, an American multinational developer of analytics software. Mia is responsible for providing technical support for JMP academic users. Prior to joining SAS, she was an Adjunct Professor of Statistics at University of New Hampshire, a founding member of the North Haven Group and a trainer and consultant with the George Group. As well as being a co-author of four books and several papers, she has developed training materials, taught, and consulted within a variety of fields and industries.

must read
Show notes including further reflections and talking points to take back to your own contexts: https://www.sefi.be/2022/10/17/podcas...

In this episode Mia explains that statistical thinking is key to understanding engineering processes and process variation, and thus process improvement. She explains that many academic programs don’t teach students to think statistically, and about the existence of a skills gap between what is taught and what industry needs. She introduces us to STIPS (Statistical Thinking for Industrial Problem Solving), a free online statistics course which introduces the statistical thinking process through 7 modules (statistical thinking and problem solving; exploratory data analysis; quality methods; decision making with data; correlation and regression; design of experiments; and predictive modelling and text mining.

Join Dr Natalie Wint (Swansea University) and Dr Neil Cooke (University of Birmingham) for this informative discussion.

Thanks to Mia for spending the time to talk to us about this ever-important topic and to everyone at JMP for supporting SEFI in its mission!

Timestamps:

0.00 Abstract

0.44 Podcast intro

1.10 Experiences of teaching statistical thinking from Neil and Natalie

2.20 Mia's background

3:10 Introduction to JMP

4:50 How do we define statistical thinking and why is it important to teach?

7:00 JMP’s expert survey into skills gap between teaching and industry

11:52 Visual Six Sigma

15:10 Barriers to teaching statistics in a practical, ‘hands-on’ way

17:33 Mia’s experience of teaching statistics to engineering students

20:25 Design of Experiments (DOE)

24:40 The STIPS (Statistical Thinking for Industrial Problem Solving) course

28:00 Use of STIPS in industry

29:00 Big data and what’s next for statistical thinking

30:13 Final advice from Mia

31:20 Accessing the STIPS course

32:12 Key takeaways from Natalie and Neil.

Resources:

https://www.jmp.com/en_no/online-stat...

Visual Six Sigma: Making Data Analysis Lean | JMP

must read Show notes including further reflections and talking points to take back to your own contexts: https://www.sefi.be/2022/10/17/podcas...

Become a member of the European Society for Engineering Education, SEFI, Europe's largest network of engineering educators: www.sefi.be

Leave us feedback/comments/suggestions: https://forms.gle/tMDHxf1JA8P9RYMY8

Music by ComaStudio https://pixabay.com/users/comastudio-...

Written and produced by Neil Cooke and Natalie Wint.