Dave worked with Bill Kappele for over a year to make changes that he felt the course had needed for several years. When Dave's health no longer allowed him to continue, Bill pulled all of this work together into the new curriculum you see today.
This has been a massive effort, and it continues to be one. We have five courses planned. The basic and advanced DOE classes are complete. These are a new generation of classes that covers a slightly broader range of materials than Dave's two classes. Specific differences are detailed below.
The intro class differs from Dave's old class in several ways. It is more hands-on as far as using the software. It shows students an effective path to take when the model needs to be more complex than the one chosen originally, it teaches about I-optimal designs, and it works in a few details that Dave had wanted to attend to for years. Validation for the learning objectives is built in, and the class now only takes three days. Perhaps most significantly, we now allow a maximum of 25 students in a class (our data indicates that people who came to classes with less than 25 people were more than twice as likely to apply the lessons as those who came to larger classes).
People who took the old course and have taken the new unanimously prefer the new. As you might imagine, the only people who have taken both classes are people that loved the first one so this is a pretty impressive record. These are people who tell us that Dave's old class changed their life, and they all say that the new class works even better.
If you have taken the old classes, one of the topics that was not thoroughly covered was transformations. The new class addresses that concern. For those that had taken the earlier training, we have also collected those questions and provided the answers on-line.
The new advanced class is very different from Dave's old mixtures course. First, we now teach I-optimal instead of D-optimal designs for mixtures and process/mixture problems. Second, we cover discrete factors, both by themselves and in conjunction with the other types of factors.
We offer instructor training, training in the use of Gosset, and we are planning to offer an even more advanced class. Drop us a line if you want information on any of this training.