An Essential Applied Statistical Analysis Course using RStudio with Project-Based Learning for Data Science

This paper presents a new postgraduate level course, named Applied Statistical Analysis with R. We present the course structure, teaching methodology including the assessment framework and student feedback. The course covers the basic concepts of statistics, the knowledge of applying statistical theory in analyzing real data and the skill of developing statistical applications with R programming language. The first half of each lesson is dedicated to teaching students the statistical concepts while the second half focuses on the practical aspects of implementing the concepts within the RStudio console. The Project-Based Learning (PBL) approach is adopted to encourage students to apply the knowledge gained to solve real world problems, answer complex questions and generate high-quality results. We present various interesting projects to show how the students have implemented their statistical knowledge in solving real problems. It is concluded that combining hands-on experience using RStudio and PBL is an effective teaching methodology to achieve the desired learning outcomes. More than 80% of students agree with the quality and usefulness of projects and there is a strong positive correlation of 0.74 between the final project grade and the final grade obtained by the students.