Practical Significance Take II: Lifelong Learning—New Opportunities for ASA Members

This interview with Michael Zyphur, director of Instats, was conducted by Practical Significance co-hosts Donna LaLonde and Ron Wasserstein during a recent episode. The American Statistical Association recently partnered with Instats, an organization dedicated to enhancing global research practices by offering expert-led training to researchers through its online platform. Zyphur, Wasserstein, and LaLonde explore this innovative learning experience, including the unique features that set the Instats platform apart.

Donna LaLonde: Please, introduce yourself and tell us about your day job.

Michael Zyphur: I’m a professor of quantitative methods at the University of Queensland, in Brisbane, Australia. I graduated from Tulane University with a PhD in industrial and organizational psychology, so I’ve had years and years of stats classes and then training in psychometrics—as well as a variety of core quantitative methodologies. I’m the director of Instats, and I work to support multidisciplinary research with our individual and institutional partners to offer content that meets their knowledge community’s needs and interests.

Ron Wasserstein: Tell us about the features that make Instats unique from the other learning platforms—from the partner perspective.

Michael Zyphur: Instats helps its partners offer their content and expertise by freely providing a full-service, technologically sophisticated, easy-to-use platform for delivering seminars and workshops, as well as connecting with the research community more broadly through free community forums, social networking, Q&A boards, and job postings.

We’ve made content creation extremely easy. And by that, what I mean is each workshop, seminar, and short course will get its own web page. And so, on the platform, some of the back-end features for our partners, you know, the experts who are on the platform who deliver content, is that almost everything at this point is AI-enabled. So, we’ve got ChatGPT fully integrated for drafting new workshop web pages and PowerPoint slides, so you never have to start from scratch. It takes about 20 seconds, and it’s quite extensive.

Ron Wasserstein: Let’s dig a little bit deeper into the learning experience from the learner’s perspective. Do the courses typically have assignments, quizzes, and hands-on activities?

Michael Zyphur: The learner experience is highly varied, and the purpose of the platform is to empower the instructors to offer content in a style that is consistent with what they think is best.

Content that is more theoretical will be a little more discussion oriented. But if somebody wants to do something that involves a lot of exercises and hands-on work, they can also do that. The key for us is to work with our partners to ensure the description of their workshop or the content they’re offering is accurate, so participants know what they’re getting themselves into, then everything is completely fine from the learner’s perspective.

So, there’s a lot of variation there, which is consistent with the varied interests of the individuals who make up the knowledge communities represented on our platform.

Donna LaLonde: Would you walk us through the ASA member platform experience, from registering for a course through completion?

Michael Zyphur: The registration process for ASA members is similar to all registrants with one slight variation, which is an ASA member benefit. First, the registrant will create an Instats user account, which takes about 10 seconds. During user account creation, we’ll inquire about membership in a professional association or society.

After user account creation, registrants will confirm their email address, and ASA members receive an automatic 30% discount on all fee-based content. We also whitelist their account so they can access content that is free for ASA members.

We offer quite a bit of free content: a free introduction to R; an introduction to some software packages; a free introduction to some techniques or methods. Those are usually quite brief, an hour, two hours, or something like that. They can just click register, and then they’re automatically registered.

For fee-based content, click “Register” and the user is redirected to our credit card processor, and enrollment begins in that moment.

Those who enroll in an upcoming live-streaming seminar can access the offering by clicking the Zoom link, and you’ll be taken directly into the meeting. You’ll watch the person who’s delivering and be able to ask questions, just like any Zoom meeting. Be assured, we don’t record your camera view.

You can also miss the live session and still engage with the content asynchronously. We get the recordings and process them as quickly as we can. It’s usually within 12 hours, and then they’re up on the site having been professionally edited and ready for viewing.

Participants have 30 days of access to those recordings for any live workshop. We’re a global organization, so we have people enrolling for workshops taking place at 3:00 a.m., so they’re engaging with the content asynchronously.

Ron Wasserstein: That’s really remarkable. How do users locate content of interest on the site?

Michael Zyphur: Users should visit our landing page, and then scroll down under the “Seminars” heading. The first thing you’ll see is offerings listed chronologically for our upcoming live-streaming workshops.

You can filter the live seminars, on-demand seminars, and structured courses and sort by keywords, date, topic, format, instructor, and cost. You can also search all the individual sessions within a workshop or seminar. For example, a three-day workshop might include three separate sessions per day. These can last from 40 minutes to two hours depending on the expert’s discretion.

And at this point, we offer more than 150 workshops in the on-demand streaming space, and some are free. Many of them are fee-based and offered by leading experts in their areas. So, you can find the content you’re after.

Ron Wasserstein: We’re excited about the ASA-Instats partnership and learning opportunities for our members. What are some of the most popular existing courses?

Michael Zyphur: Some core topics are popular on our platform, and those are related to, for example, causal inference and methods with longitudinal panel data. And with the AI revolution, what we’ve also seen is a lot of content being generated by our partners on how to incorporate ChatGPT into research workflows—in ethical ways.

Regarding ChatGPT, I want to emphasize that we explore how we can put it to use in good faith. What is this technology? How can we use it, for example, to write Python code? How can we use it to write our code? How can we use it to make our research workflows more efficient and perhaps create some internal, informal reviews of manuscripts and papers?

In our view, AI is not going away. So those workshops that incorporate new AI methods are quite popular. That is true in both the live and on-demand space. So, we’ve got traditional topics that are of interest, as well as new and emerging areas being quite popular.

Ron Wasserstein: You’ve provided terrific insight into the instructor experience. What course offerings would you like to see ASA members bring to the platform?

Michael Zyphur: That’s an interesting question, and it’s one I get asked a lot by new experts when they come onto the platform: “What do you think I should do? What kind of content should I offer?”

And the answer I almost always give is, “What do you love? What are you passionate about? Because we built this platform as a means to express yourself and your passions and your interests to other members of your research community.”

We completely understand passion-driven scholarship and forms of communication—it’s an incredibly important part of what it is to be a researcher, a scholar, an academic. So, if there’s something you love or you believe the community needs to hear about, we’re here to support it.