RIT Applied Statistics Professor Tom Barker has always put a great deal of effort into making his videotaped lectures entertaining and easy to comprehend, but he never anticipated reaching the minds of two eight-year-old twin sisters.

The twins are daughters of John Del Gallo, a student from Charlotte, N.C. who is enrolled in RIT’s online learning master of science in applied statistics program. The young girls have taken a keen interest in Barker’s design of experiments videotaped lectures that they have watched with their Dad.

Online learning at RIT takes advantage of the Internet and computer conferencing along with other multimedia technologies, such as videotaped and/or CD-ROM lectures, to deliver the classroom to the student’s home and computer connection. With more than 7,900 enrollments per academic year and 20 years of experience in distance learning, RIT offers students the benefit of top quality and tested anytime/anywhere, asynchronous online degree programs.

Kids Say the Darnedest Things

Some of material on the videotapes obviously stuck with Del Gallo’s daughters. This became evident to Del Gallo and his wife at a parent-teacher conference. The teacher told them that their daughter asked a representative of the North Carolina State Education Board, who was giving a presentation to the third-grade class, if the state’s student testing program was utilizing a design of experiment approach in their analysis of student performance? And furthermore, were they using 25 percent of their budget for the experiment?

On another occasion Del Gallo’s daughters asked him if Dr. Barker could fill in for their teacher’s aid who had moved on to a new assignment.

While the Del Gallo twins have certainly gained some knowledge, so has their father, who has found the applied statistics program to be exactly what he was looking for to boost his job performance as applications manager at J.M. Huber Corporation in Charlotte. Del Gallo, who is one year into the RIT degree program, oversees a computerized maintenance management system for J.M Huber’s Engineered Woods division, which is a specialty producer of engineered strand products for both construction and industrial markets.

"I was looking all over the Web to see if I could find a distance learning program because here in Charlotte they didn’t have an applied statistics program. One of the criteria was that I wanted a lot of the instructors to have experience in the field, and RIT had instructors that had prior experience in manufacturing. I wanted to go with an applied program because I wanted to apply it to real-world situations."

Applying What’s Learned Online to the Real World

The strategy has paid off. "Everything I’ve learned, I’ve applied somewhere along the line," says Del Gallo, who has already saved his company thousands of dollars. For instance he used what he learned from a statistical process control class to monitor payroll errors. "Because of the charts and the investigation of the data points that exceeded the upper limits, we managed to drive payroll error rates down to an acceptable level," he claims. "Because of this action my company has saved $130,000 this year. In addition, we stopped the purchase of a $1.2 million payroll application."

Del Gallo has also found the interaction with his fellow online students to be invaluable. "Because of my interactions with students I was able to plan a design of experiment for one of our factories," he says. "I learned the pitfalls to expect when designing the experiment and what to encounter from employees when trying to implement the experiment. Because of these interaction, the DOE went well. . . it improved my status within the company. We now have a couple of forms that I designed that I learned about the DOE class that we are using throughout the company now."

In short, all parties concerned – father, daughters and employer – are pleased. "With the service I have received at RIT, it seems like its hassle free going to school," Del Gallo admits. "Every time I had a problem, the problem has always been resolved to my satisfaction."

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