Congratulations, team! This is a huge deal!:)
At JMP, we know that our free online course, Statistical Thinking for Industrial Problem Solving (STIPS) provides high-quality statistical instruction that’s second to none. It appears the world’s largest and oldest professional association for technical communication agrees.
In March, the Society for Technical Communication (STC) awarded STIPS the prestigious Award of Excellence for online training. STC Carolina Chapter Competition Chair Christina Mayr informed JMP of the award, noting that the STC defines an Award of Excellence recipient as “consistently meeting the highest standards in all areas and clearly demonstrating an exceptional understanding of technical communication principles.”
In addition to the award notification, the STC also included commentary from the judges’ assessments, and they were filled with wonderful feedback that attests to the high quality of this training and all of the hard work that went into producing the course. Here are just a few of their quotes:
- The training program is scripted and written in an engaging way. The flow of words, to phrases, to sentences to paragraphs is sharp. The writing is concise and crisp.
- The language does not coach the students to the right answer, it encourages to think about the content and draw conclusions.
- The instructional method is excellent. A teacher appears in a short video to remind students that this is a self-paced course, but human help is still available. The lessons are short and tight. They have just the right amount of complex information broken down into manageable chunks. The practices embed the learning material, and the test ensures students know the subject before moving to the next lesson.
- The artwork, charts, etc. are seamlessly integrated in the presentation.
- Animation supports the discussion—I can’t imagine this presentation without it.
STIPS was entered into the competition by Jim Farrell, SAS Education’s Director, Learning Design and Development. And in many ways, the course is a shining example of the successful partnership JMP had with SAS Education throughout the course development process.
“It took a large village to develop and produce STIPS, and it was a great privilege to work with such a talented, knowledgeable and professional group,” said JMP Principal Product Manager Mia Stephens, the course’s primary architect. “In addition to the army of JMP staff who worked on the course, SAS Education, in particular Linda Mueller and Candace Marles, dedicated countless hours making sure the course provided the very best in online instruction.”
And developing the course was just the start. In the months following its release, the team worked hard to promote the training, make it widely available on our website and in Coursera and provide it for free on companies’ internal learning platforms to help them strengthen their statistical training efforts. “Our instructional designers, Ledi Trutna… there are just so many who dedicated literally thousands of manhours to making the course a success,” Stephens concluded.
While it’s certainly nice to receive recognition from the Society for Technical Communication, the course has proved popular with another important audience: the public. Since its release in 2018, more than 25,000 individuals have enrolled in the course. Some of JMP’s biggest customers strongly encourage their employees to take the course as well, regarding it as critical for training their staff in statistical concepts. (Exxon Mobil has enrolled nearly 300 individuals; Dow Chemical more than 250; and Novozymes Biotech and NXP Semiconductors more than 200 each.)
Momentum for the course continues to grow. Late last year team members completed a massive translation effort and the course, in its entirety, is now available in Japanese, Chinese and Korean.
In addition to an official award, which is being mailed and will be on display somewhere in Building A very soon, an awards banquet is scheduled for June. In the meantime, we hope everyone who played a role in creating the course takes a moment to celebrate this incredible accomplishment.
“We knew that STIPS was good, and now we can say that we’ve developed an award-winning course!” Stephens exclaimed.
