Challenge to the Established Curriculum: A Collection of Reflections

We invited a number of prominent statisticians and statistics educators to glimpse into the future to discuss what they see as the significant challenges to the established statistics curriculum that enculturate students into statistical practices that underpin the activity of statisticians. Peng, Kreuter, and Gould discuss various developments, which are already gaining traction in current society and will support the notion of immersion in a data-rich curriculum. The influence of MOOCs, “big data,” and Bayesian approaches is primarily discussed by these writers in relation to an undergraduate curriculum. Pruim raises some key questions about teaching computation in statistics with a particular emphasis on undergraduates and programming. In the final piece of writing, Witmer and Cobb discuss the increasing influence of Bayesian inference with an emphasis on a curriculum that fosters statistical reasoning and the evaluation of arguments.