Blog

The new academic year is well and truly underway and for many of us this means a return to the classroom, at least to some extent. While it has been wonderful to see students in 3D once again, most of us are still using some of the teaching tools that we used during the pandemic: a new academic year, yet another way of teaching.

This year, with hybrid teaching on offer at my own institution at least for some, students seem to be enjoying their (rather limited) time in class and appreciating the balance between face to face and online elements. The sense of community between students has been partially restored, which was, if you ask me, one of the biggest downsides of purely online teaching.

But where do we go from here? I’d put money on us about to enter a very different “normal” for Higher Education, and to be honest I hope we don’t completely return to the pre-covid model. There have been numerous successes over the past 18 months, even if it hasn’t always felt like it. So how do we put education – in my case statistics education - back together again?

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I’m writing this on a sunny February morning in 2021 and wondering if this time last year I would have believed just how much online teaching and learning would take place during the many months of covid19 disrupted life which was to follow. Given that I work for The Open University, where all my students learn at a distance, the change in teaching was not too different from any other year. Though the way that we support students did change, not least due to the disruption the pandemic wreaked on staff and students alike. However, our teaching carried on in much the same way. This was far from the case for most of the rest of the HE sector.

The swift close of university campuses in March 2020 saw the abrupt switch to online exams and learning. It was the beginning of May that Michael Grove from the IMA, Kevin Houston from the LMS and myself had an initial conversation voicing concerns that come September teaching in universities might be very different from what we had been used too in the past....

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It may only be early in the new decade, but I have already had two pieces of excellent news relating to teaching statistics. On 6th January, I was announced as the Royal Statistical Society’s (RSS) William Guy Lecturer for 2020. This means that I will be delivering lectures to school students across the UK on the topic of ‘Driving is a risky business!’ Whether we drive or cycle, catch the bus or walk, we are all affected by driving, and the policies surrounding it. How do we therefore decide whether people with long-term medical conditions should be offered driving licences? My lecture will attempt to answer this question for people who have had epileptic seizures.

I will begin by encouraging the audience to deliberate an acceptable level of risk of an accident in the first year after passing a driving test. I will then prompt debate as to whether this level of risk should also apply to people with underlying medical conditions such as epilepsy. Next, I will outline (in an accessible way) the statistical modelling required to calculate the risk of the event, and how these risks can be based on clinical characteristics.

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