Vision for Department of Mathematical Statistics and Actuarial Science 2025 to 2029

Sean van der Merwe

Introduction

My hope is that you see my integrated vision and buy into it, so that we can move forward together as a team.

Overview

  • Short term changes
  • Medium term changes
  • Longer term changes

By my calculations, the workload increases caused by my ideas will amount to +1%, +2%, and -3% for the three terms respectively, but only if you follow my suggestions.

How long is long term?

I would love it if five years from now perhaps

  • Professors Verster, Shongwe, Ludick, Diko, and Voges compete to take over the department

While

  • Professors Koning, Chakraborty, Da Silva, Correa, Oosthuizen, Girmay, Blomerus, Von Maltitz, Sjölander, Essel-Mensah, and Chikobvu are supervising PhDs from across SADC, BRICS, etc.

Names in random order and placement, don’t @ me

Practical matters

Let’s get practical first.

Short term

  • Sean will take over administrative matters from Frans
  • Frans will take research leave and write a draft paper at least
  • Sean will delegate some non-ADH work to others to make room
    • This will not be a surprise
    • See my email detailing the M/PhD management work that now becomes the responsibility of the Departmental Research Committee, for example

Medium term

My medium term focus will be on upskilling the department:

  • I will start delegating the occasional consultation project to members of the department other than the usual
    • Solving problems outside your comfort zone will make you a better researcher and lecturer
  • I will conduct more technical workshops on various topics, say once a term
    • Like how to correctly make an appointment for my time in a way that is not so disruptive (Hint: you can check my availability on Teams before you call me!)
  • I will do/repeat some workshops on useful tools and technologies

Peer engagement and Reflection for teaching

This is an idea I’ve been pushing for years and implementing in my own course, but now I see that the latest teaching portfolio guidelines talk about formalised peer assessment processes and reflection. Not only is this validating to me, but also provides support for me to spread this to the whole department.

  • Peer assessment is a requirement in a good teaching portfolio, and a good teaching portfolio is a requirement for a good teaching score, which in turn is a requirement for promotion.
  • Do not equate assessment with judgment, they are not the same thing. This is a positive thing, which is why I want to call it #peer engagement

My proposal

  • From March 2025 I propose that every lecturer attend 1 lecture of another lecturer every teaching month.
    • So that’s 6 lectures, one for each of 6 different lecturers, every year (Mar, Apr, May, Aug, Sep, Oct)
  • That same day, send that lecturer an email containing:
    • At least one complement on something they do well, and
    • At least one constructive idea for possible improvement
  • Copy me in, with subject line containing #peer engagement
  • Finally, every June at least, reflect on the feedback and write down what you have done or are doing to improve
    • So total 10h/year but you’ll thank me in the long run

Longer term deeper matters

The difficult conversations

Teaching improvement

If we aren’t constantly learning and improving then we are going backwards because the world is moving forward without us.

Improvement should apply to all areas of teaching, but there are many ways to do it:

  • Deliberately spend 15% of the time you give to a course improving it every year
  • You could spend a chunk of time reworking one aspect at a time, or
  • Get help from a CTL learning designer or the curriculum redesign team, or
  • Attend teaching workshops and implement

General improvement

I firmly believe that we should be spending 10 to 20% of the time of every activity improving our skills in that activity!

  • Requires meta-cognition (stop and think about your thinking)
  • For every 10 hours of research, spend at least an hour deliberately getting better at research
    • That can be researching research skills, or research approaches (+philosophy of science)
    • or research tools (like Overleaf/Mendelay/RMarkdown)
    • Can include writing skills, or mathematics skills, and especially coding skills!

Practical stepwise teaching improvement

  • For every 10 hours of teaching, spend at least an hour improving either your course or your teaching skills in general
    • Surprisingly, improving yourself tends to give the better return on investment, because the general skills flow into all your courses
  • Course improvements could include making more videos (try Panopto to force engagement with the videos via mini quizzes inside)
  • Skills improvements could include learning new tools for creating better assessments, including CoPilot, RMarkdown, Autograders
  • Speaking of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI), it is critical that everyone learn to combat abuse
    • It doesn’t matter what approach you pick in your course, the students will use it, and a few will abuse it

Succession planning

  • I genuinely consider everyone in the department to be irreplaceable
  • But time marches on and people move on
  • So we will need to evolve

Heavy hitters in publishing

  • Publishing in statistics is more difficult than in most fields (see JM van Zyl and S vdMerwe, 2013 )
  • Publishing in all fields has a very heavy tail (same citation)
  • Our department is at or near the top in the country in terms of stats publications (and has been for most of Frans’ term)
  • A lot of this is due to our star performers
  • The faculty must realise that our department’s current record numbers might not be sustainable

Managing the risk and expectations

The solution is for everyone to get together in the publications game.

  • Research should be a priority for every member of staff
  • But you can’t just tell people to publish and research more
    • People don’t just magically get publications out of nowhere
  • We must create both passion and an enabling environment

Even if this works, the total numbers might still be lower than now. To balance that everyone should recruit more postgraduate students (not necessarily for yourself).

Research passion

  • A way to create research passion is through better collaboration.
  • Collaboration isn’t just co-publishing, it is also co-motivation and co-inspiration!
  • At least once per month go to a colleague you don’t normally talk research with and ask them what they are working on. If you have a tip for them then share it. You could mention a research angle, a research tool, or words of motivation!

Enabling environment

  • Research is a creative process, so it requires time.
  • If people are overloaded with teaching (or worse: admin) then it won’t happen.
    • Thus, reducing and balancing admin and teaching load is something I consider a priority.
  • That said,

A lot of us have the time, but waste it. When you have a research project you’re passionate about then you squeeze it in between classes. Where otherwise you’d say to yourself, “I’ve got a thing in 30 minutes, I can’t get into it now,” instead you say, “Let me quickly write another paragraph or read another paper.”

Streamlining and other ideas

  • I have many other ideas, but they are best discussed at length in specific workshops
  • The key idea is to actively put departmental effort into streamlining our work
  • We all spend way too much time on tasks that are a bad use of our skills
    • More tasks get delegated and loaded onto individuals each year
  • If everyone spends an hour now figuring out how to save themselves and others 2 hours in the long run, then that’s 40 hours saved across the department!

Conclusion

Thank you for listening, and for considering my vision.

Remember that I’m here to serve and support my department because I appreciate all of your efforts and all of you as individuals.

Gratitude drives everything I do.

2024/11/11 - ADH plan