In March of 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic came to a head with widespread quarantines, the Stat-Ease training team quickly Zoomed (pun intended) our workshops from in-person (IP) to distance learning (DL). It went amazingly well from the start.

Coincidentally, two of my grandchildren shifted from IP grade-school to DL at our home. The youngest, a kindergartner (Laine), benefited greatly by the oversight of my wife Karen—a retired preschool teacher. I helped the other (Archer), a third grader. It did not start well due to many technical difficulties and troublesome adjustments for teachers and students. We continued our DL home schooling the following school year due to the ongoing quarantine in Minnesota. By the time IP classes resumed, the DL went about as well as could be expected—the most difficult class being physical education, especially in the winter due to our home lacking a gym.

This unplanned experiment on DL across the range of child versus adult revealed a big interaction effect due to the age of the learners—IP being best for grade schoolers and DL being a very viable alternative for mature students. A few weeks ago, I got reinforcement for this observation when teaching cribbage IP as a volunteer to Laine—now in 4th grade—and two of her classmates. This would have been far harder DL.

The reason I’m bringing all this up is that my colleague Shari Kraber, who retired as our workshop manager but continues to provide training, asserts that “in-person training is not as ideal educationally and that the retention of the materials is BETTER using distance learning.”* I’m also a big fan of DL—far easier for me to teach from my home offices in my summer or my winter home (or on the road between). Google’s AI (Gemini) says that there’s no definitive answer on IP vs DL, and that the biggest factor is quality of the teaching and the materials, which makes a lot of sense to me.

Rachel Poleke, our current workshop manager, suggests that another big factor is the preference of individual students for IP versus DL. I totally agree: Ideally the delivery would be tailored to each student. This being impractical, Stat-Ease instead offers on a class-wide basis to deliver private training either way, depending on the preference of our client. For example, one year ago last September I traveled to Netherlands to teach a DOE workshop for a client headquartered in Leiden’s Bio Science Park. That was fun and very gratifying for the great response. It’s nice to take a break from Dl, benefitting by much stronger feedback from students (e.g., the ‘deer in the headlights’ look when clueless) and the ability to watch them work through case studies (our workshops are computer intensive).

Stat-Ease plans to present a rare IP public workshop—Modern DOE for Medical Devices—at our Minneapolis headquarters this year. This brings a huge advantage of DL training immediately to mind: Anyone from anywhere in the world can Zoom in, thus making it far easier for us to achieve a critical mass for class.

One thing I can say for sure—it’s great to have such a viable option for DL nowadays. When I first began working as a trainer of quality-engineering tools in the 1970’s, the technology for DL existed (e.g., PLATO) but, being pre-Internet and all, it could not compete with IP.

It will be interesting to see how things settle out in coming years for IP versus DL, both for corporate training and schooling at primary and secondary levels. Hopefully, the quality of education (based on subjective measures!) will not be lost in the shuffle of convenience for scheduling and the relative costs.

*1/1/25 Stat-Ease blog Ask An Expert: Shari Kraber