COURSES
Here are the courses I've taught at the University of Kansas.
Agent-Based Modeling
PSYC 469 Undergrad credit
PSYC 800 Grad credit
Agent-based modeling has established itself as a powerful exploratory tool in the formal, physical, and especially the social sciences. This is a 3-unit one-semester elective that offers students a hands-on introduction to some landmark models, the core concepts, and the techniques of agent-based modeling.
Computational Social Science
2020 Fall
PSYC 469 Undergrad credit
PSYC 800 Grad credit
Computational social science is a new interdisciplinary frontier in the social sciences. This course is a seminar-format survey of computational approaches to social science research, with emphasis on methods, tools, software frameworks, and complexity theory as these apply to the investigation of social phenomena.
Data Science
2020 Fall, 2021 Spring
PSYC 500 Undergrad credit - course website
We (with Dr. Tim Pleskac, Dr. Marsha McCartney, and Xiaohong Cai) redesign PSYC 500 (formerly, Intermediate Statistics for Psychological Research) to Introduction to Data Science. This course offers computational and statistical thinking, mathematical foundations, model building and software foundation, data curation, and knowledge transference, as well as a hands-on introduction to Python and Google Colab. This is funded by the course transformation grant from KU center for teaching excellence.
TEACHING INNOVATION
My teaching has been focused on the application of computational modeling and data science perspectives to psychological research. Having been funded by the course transformation grant from KU center for teaching excellence, I developed a data science curriculum for psychology students at KU, and taught the use of the python programming language for statistical analysis and machine learning techniques. I also created the curriculum for both agent-based modeling and computational social science courses in such a way that topics relate to the literature on psychological research.
The most innovative part of this endeavor is how I created these courses completely online (due to covid19). For example, I created my data science course website which contained lecture slides, python tutorials, and projects. I used a flipped classroom format such that students watched my lecture at their convenience, and during the class meeting students formed small research groups and worked together on research projects under my supervision. I provided various open, real-world data including KCMO 311 service requests, KU art center ticket sales for the last 10 years, US election, air quality, one world in data, gapminder, etc. Students selected data that was useful to understand urgent and important social issues. Once students took ownership of their projects and models, they became deeply engaged in the process of scientific research by using the research methods and analytic techniques that they learned in the class. At the end of the semester, students presented their projects via virtual mini-conferences.