Data-Driven Business Decisions

To the Teacher: How to Build a Course Around This Book

Course Structure. The order of the topics is quite deliberate. However, the first two chapters cover the basic ideas of performance measurement and data handling. The early introduction to Excel is especially important to the way I teach, because I want students to do all the calculations themselves. Some students wonder why they need to do this, if they will not be analysts themselves. The reason is that you learn more deeply when you do something yourself.

I believe that you need to study probability before you try inference. So, all the probability material comes first, in Chapters 3–8. The remaining 12 chapters are on various aspects of inference and data analysis. There are four chapters on multiple regression.

Class Structure. Each of the 20 topics in the book corresponds to one 90-min class. I expect students to have read most of each chapter prior to the class. They should also have read at least one case, and have done some preparatory calculations for the case, which you may make part of the formal assessment. It is amazing how much better a class goes when 100% of the students have opened the data, thought about the problem, and done some calculations.

The class is best built around a single case. However, statistics cannot be taught entirely in “case mode.” There is some lecturing that has to be endured. Some of the basic concepts and theory I explain at the beginning of the class, some throughout the case, and ...