Dynamic Data in the Statistics Classroom

TL;DR

This paper advocates for incorporating real-time, dynamic data retrieval from the Internet into statistics education, demonstrating its feasibility and educational benefits for introductory students.

Contribution

It introduces practical methods and examples for teaching with dynamic data, expanding beyond static datasets in the statistics classroom.

Findings

Five full analyses using dynamic data are presented.

Nine additional sources of dynamic data are identified for classroom use.

Using dynamic data is accessible for beginners and enhances engagement.

Abstract

The call for using real data in the classroom has long meant using datasets which are culled, cleaned, and wrangled prior to any student working with the observations. However, an important part of teaching statistics should include actually retrieving data from the Internet. Nowadays, there are many different sources of data that are continually updated by the organization hosting the data website. The R tools to download such dynamic data have improved in such a way to make accessing the data possible even in an introductory statistics class. We provide five full analyses on dynamic data as well as an additional nine sources of dynamic data that can be brought into the classroom. The goal of our work is to demonstrate that using dynamic data can have a short learning curve, even for introductory students or faculty unfamiliar with the landscape. The examples provided are unlikely to create expert data scrapers, but they should help motivate students and faculty toward more engaged use of online data sources.