Learning
Menu location: Help > Learning, and Help > Learning Options for its preferences.
Learning opens as a window of its own in StatsDirect: a library of short lessons in biostatistics and epidemiology, each with a guide and a worked example, a tutor to question, practice questions and a learning record. The lessons and their examples are original teaching material, shared with the Mac version of StatsDirect. The tutor is ChatGPT through your own account, as in Script AI, and its feedback can be wrong. The record stays on this computer, and external review is needed for any accreditation.
On the left, choose your professional or study context (Medical undergraduate, Postgraduate medicine or Public health postgraduate) and your next step with R (Start with menus, Connect menus to R or Practise R coding); the lessons are listed beneath. There are twelve:
- Epidemiological foundations
- From association to causal questions
- Comparing paired measurements
- Variation, precision and uncertainty
- Interpreting a diagnostic test
- Absolute and relative benefit
- Association is not causation
- Comparing population rates
- Appraising a trial result
- Understanding missing data
- Checking prediction performance
- Combining study results
A lesson opens with its guide and worked example and three buttons. Try in StatsDirect opens a workbook holding the example's data and the dialog of the method, for you to run it yourself. Explore in R opens the lesson's R script in an R script window and runs it. Read help opens the method's help topic. Below them is the tutor's conversation: ask a question, explain your thinking or paste a small R example, or choose Explain simply, Test my understanding or Help me learn R. The tutor knows the lesson, your learning preferences and the conversation so far; when you send, your question, the lesson's relevant extracts and your preferences go to OpenAI.
Your open workbooks, reports and scripts are not shared unless you choose one of them, or all, in the box above the conversation, whose first setting is lessons only. Check the shared documents for person identifiers before confirming. Acceptance is remembered for the application session; selecting different data requires confirmation again. With a workbook shared, the tutor can read its values as needed and run supported analyses on approved rows through StatsDirect's own engine, adding the result to your report with its Continue in R record. This controlled analysis tool does not edit worksheet values. The Script and Report AI pane has a separate Share open workbook data checkbox covering every open workbook.
Practice questions gives a question set for your context. Supported practice gives feedback after each answer, with Give me a hint, Explain the principle and Discuss with the tutor; independent practice pauses the tutor and withholds feedback until the end, for a score you can keep. Exam examples and sources lists public sources of exam-style questions and offers a conversation exercise in explaining a result to a colleague.
My learning record holds the lessons visited, the conversations, the practice attempts and your reflection. It is stored in the StatsDirect folder of your Windows account's local application data and nowhere else. Save on the File menu saves it; Export learning record writes it as text, JSON, HTML, PDF or a Word document; Prepare email draft makes an email with the record attached as text and JSON, for a tutor or provider to review, which you send yourself. You can attach a text snapshot of an open report or R script to the record, and import a provider's response to it. StatsDirect records the response as supplied; it does not award credit.
Learning Options holds what the tutor is told about you: your statistical skills and experience, the exams or courses you are studying for and their date, your goals and how you would like the tutor to help, and your confidence with R. It also holds your training provider, if you have one: its name and course, the address that assessments go to, the kind of assessment (none, continuing professional development credits, or AI-supported self-assessment), and a course pack of notes, lessons or practice questions from the provider, as PDF, Markdown, text or a StatsDirect course pack, whose relevant extracts accompany your questions. Import only material you may share with OpenAI. Try example course loads a sample pack.
Use my ChatGPT connects the tutor, with the first-use download, the sign-in and the policy switch for organisations that the Script AI topic describes. Without a connection, the lessons, their examples, the practice questions and the record work as before; only the tutor's replies need it.