"Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly."  - wenger-trayner.com [1]

The OAC Stats Support Service will facilitate Communities of Practice (COP) to engage the OAC research community and assist with the statistical analyses and statistical software. Our researchers use a variety of statistical approaches and statistical software packages to conduct their research, by meeting, sharing perspectives, and learning new aspects of our software and/or statistical approaches, as a community, we can create enriched learning environments for all.

Please register for the session that you would like to attend.  There is one registration link for each COP, with a list of dates.  Please register for each date you plan to attend.

Fall 2017, saw the creation and revitalization of four COPs:

• SASsy Fridays
• Crimes of Statistics
• OAC R Users Group
• OAC Data Visualization

SASsy Fridays

SASsy Fridays started as a user group in W14 in response to the growing interest of SAS-specific topics beyond what was being taught in the workshops. If you use SAS and are interested in learning and sharing new approaches to using the software or new statistical approaches in SAS, this is the COP for you!  For past topics please review the SASsy Fridays blog [2].  If you have a topic you would like to present or would like more information about, please email oacstats@uoguelph.ca [3]. 

OAC R Users Group

R is growing in popularity and is gaining international acceptance in the research community. The goal of this group will be to exchange knowledge about R-packages and R-libraries that your research field or your lab uses. A short presentation or demonstration of  practical application of an R-package or R-library will be followed by questions and exploration of other uses for the presented material. 

Crimes of Statistics

Many of us conduct experiments and run the appropriate statistical analysis, but sometimes we can get caught up in questioning the basics of the theoretical background. Topics such as replication, sampling, power, p-values, and many more. This COP will meet to discuss these and other topics. A short presentation on the topic du jour and a review of published papers, will be followed by a discussion of situations you may have encountered.  For more information of the topics and papers that will be discussed, please visit the Crimes of Statistics COP on the OACstats Blog [4]. 

Data Visualization

You have been collecting data for a project and now it's time to do something with it! What do you do? How do you present it? Should it be a table? A graph? A chart? This COP will discuss different ways of presenting data, the pros and cons of different formats, and will encourage the community to demonstrate their favourite data visualization formats. To view items we've discussed in the past, please visit the Data Visualization pieces on the OACStats blog [5].