Title III Equipment Mini-Grants

Software Grant

Progress Report

Submitted by: Ihsuan Li

Business and Economics Department

5-11-2007

Progress Report

On October 2006 I requested a mini-grant funding for the purchase of an external hard drive and two Stata online courses.

I received a Seagate 120 GB external hard drive in December 2006. I am having great success in backing up all data from the laptop. The laptop and the external hard drive complement each other and they work seamlessly. As evidence, I refer to the help ticket lists I submitted since December of 2006: there were no help tickets sent to CIR in terms of hardware problems.

I also received funding to take Stata online courses. I registered for Netcourse NC151, the course started on January 19 and lasted till March 2, 2007. There were four online lectures. In addition, I purchased 2 Stata manuals in lieu of taking NC461 Netcourse (due to scheduling and availability I was unable to register for the second course, NN461). This change was approved by Title 3 director. The cost of NC151 was $150; the course itself was online, participation was voluntary, and there were no measure of learning. In the future, I would not take another online course. The Stata manuals were more useful, the titles of the books purchased were: 33 Stata Tips and Stata Graphics. The total cost for the Netcourse and the books was $219.55, including shipping, which is lower than the amount requested ($420).

An expected benefit of purchasing the Stata manuals and taking the online course was the incorporation of Stata programming in economic courses. I have not taught any quantitative course in spring 2007, I will be teaching Econometrics (ECO330) the fall 2007 semester. The syllabus and course evaluation on the specific impact of Stata (including materials in the manuals) will be submitted to Title 3 director in the final report.