Director of Online Education
Associate Teaching Professor
Justin_Post@ncsu.edu (NC State)
919.515.0637
At this point all educators are pretty familiar with teaching online! Luckily I began teaching online pre-pandemic which allowed for a smooth transition during ‘the COVID years’ (shutters). I started teaching ST 501/502 (Fundamentals of Statistical Inference I/II) in the online format for our online master of statistics program in 2015. I took over as director of the online program (and certificate program) in 2018 and since then have been almost solely teaching online and developing online courses.
Learning online requires a lot of self-motivation and discipline for the learner to be successful. While this isn’t ideal for the typical undergraduate, I really believe that online education at the graduate level provides a fantastic opportunity to help people retool or upscale their careers.
My main role is to improve and develop our online master of statistics and graduate certificate in applied statistics and data management programs. I also provide guidance for other online/hybrid course offerings in our department (hence the shuttering thinking back on the beginning of the pandemic and the massive shift to everything being online).
In this role I’ve had the opportunity to rethink the graduate program curriculum and course offerings. I’ve designed new courses in Data Science (ST 558) and Big Data Analysis (ST 554) to fill gaps in the curriculum and as well as redesigning dated courses to include more practice actually doing statistics using software.
As we try to incorporate computing into all of our courses, there was a clear need for supplemental basic programming courses to get everyone up to speed. I developed courses in R and SAS (python coming soon) which are freely available to anyone, not just our graduate students.
I’ve met a ton of awesome and interesting people in our online programs. If you are interested, there are articles about some of them here!
As part of the role I’ve also had oversight of some of our large enrollment undergraduate courses that are taught in a hybrid or flipped manner with graduate students hosting the in-person portions of the class.
Each of 311 and 307/308 enrolls approximately 800 students per regular semester.
From 2018 to 2020 I served as a DELTA Faculty Fellow. DELTA (Digital Education and Learning Technology Applications) is the group on campus that handles and trains people on most all of our digital education components (Moodle, Zoom, Panopto, etc.). DELTA is really the group that sets our university up for success in the online space. I can’t say enough great things about the people over there!
As a faculty fellow I had the opportunity to discuss teaching best practices for online and flipped courses, training of teaching assistants, and more! See the articles, workshops, quantititative literacy, & more page for more details.
Through a DELTA grant (did I mention they are awesome?) I was able to gain further training in teaching online and obtain QM certification for my ST 558 - Data Science for Statisticians course.
There is a dedicated group at DELTA (led by Bethanne Winzeler and Jill Anderson) that takes a cohort of faculty through the QM certification process each year. I now happily serve as a faculty mentor for other folks going through QM certification process!