TU-L0022 - Statistical Research Methods D, Lecture, 2.11.2021-6.4.2022

Discussion forums are the primary communication channels of the course outside the seminars. Whenever you have a question or you have a comment, unless it's a very personal question such as why is your grade missing, the place to ask is one of the course forums. There are a couple of different kinds of forums.

We have the announcements forum here and everyone is subscribed and you can't unsubscribe. So this is for things that I communicate to all the students. If I need to send you a message, then I will always do so by the announcements forum.

Then we have unit-specific forums. Every unit has one forum, and there's a task that you need to complete. So you need to post at least one question or one comment to each forum to complete a unit. These are graded, so good questions contribute to your participation grade and if you comment on other students' posts, if someone asks you a question, you answer that question, that contributes to your participation grade. These are automatic subscriptions, which means that everyone is subscribed, but you can also unsubscribe yourself. If you have heard enough of introductions on the unit one form, then you can always unsubscribe yourself from the unit one form, and then you will no longer get notifications of new posts. You can, of course, go back and read the forum, but you'll no longer get the email.

There's the general discussion forum. If you have questions that are not specific to any unit, for example, are, pretty much every year we have a discussion on which statistical software is the best. And that's a good discussion for the general forum. If you have an article and you want to ask questions about an article that you read, but it's not really related to any of the forums, then you can go for general discussions. This does not contribute towards your participation grade.

Then we have a special forum for data analysts assignment, and by default, no one is subscribed to that forum except me. And the reason for that is that this is for questions about the data assignment. And those questions are typically quite specific to an individual. So you can, for example, post log files show that Stata or R gives me this kind of error message, here is what I do, this is what I get, what's the problem? So this is for you asking questions from me, but it's as a forum so that those who want to follow what kind of problems others have and what are the solutions, can do so. But it's not automatic because this tends to generate large emails because of your log files. I have instructions on how to ask for help on that forum.

Importantly, when you have the forum here, this is an empty forum because the course has not started yet. There is the button here for subscription options. So if you think that you are getting too much email from the course, check which forums you no longer want to follow and switch subscription options, and unsubscribe from the forum.