What Makes Us Unique: A Message from Dan & Patrick
Welcome. Dan Bauer and Patrick Curran here. We are the founders of CenterStat, and we want to take a few minutes to briefly describe to you our unique strengths as a provider of quantitative and qualitative methods training. As you have undoubtedly noticed, an ever-increasing number of online businesses will happily take your money in exchange for training in statistics, methods, and research design. CenterStat is one of them. However, we believe that there a number of features of our training program that makes us unique among our peers. We’d like to highlight a few of these with you.
A Pop-and-Pop Outfit
First, instead of a faceless online company, CenterStat is an old-school pop-and-pop outfit founded by the two of us 15 years ago. We first became close friends a quarter of a century ago, and as time unfolded we both joined the L.L. Thurstone Psychometric Lab as faculty members of the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina. We started teaching together by offering a single class in the questionable opulence of a Hampton Inn ballroom, with complimentary cold coffee and green bananas, and from there we’ve grown into what CenterStat is today. From our very first class to today, our training program has been designed and run by the two of us alone. We don’t relegate important tasks to AI, and we make every major decision together. You can also reach out to us directly. Do you have a question about the content of a class you took? We will respond to your email. Do you want to discuss options for on-site training? We will meet with you via Zoom. We are deeply committed to teaching and mentorship and simply refuse to allow an LLM to run our business.
A Deliberately Curated Curriculum
Second, we’re intimately involved in all the workshops that CenterStat provides, selecting and developing these with intentionality rather than simply platforming a hodgepodge of classes with unclear distinctions or organization. For the past two decades, one or the other of us served as Director of the Quantitative Psychology Graduate Program at UNC (curiously making each of us the other’s boss). A key responsibility of this position was to develop a curriculum in quantitative methods and research design for all student of our own department as well as students in allied fields. We have drawn on this extensive experience to create a similarly integrated curriculum at CenterStat. Whereas some providers offer a laundry list of dozens if not hundreds of alphabetized classes taught by anyone willing to upload a video, we instead curate classes from internationally recognized leaders in their fields within five integrated, curricular pathways: foundational topics, measurement and latent variables, longitudinal design and analysis, data science and machine learning, and qualitative research methods. Classes within each pathway are inter-connected with one another, enabling participants to build comprehensive knowledge in each area. Indeed, classes can be chosen to mimic the level of training one would receive over multiple years in a doctoral program with the highest quality course offerings available in the world.
The Highest Quality Materials Available
Third, our workshops consistently deliver the highest quality materials available anywhere, designed to follow best practices in pedagogy so that you gain both a deep understanding of the underlying principles of the methodology and the ability to confidently apply it in your own work. We want you to understand what you’re doing, not just how to do it (potentially incorrectly) in software program X, Y, or Z (or even R!). For all courses, we provide detailed notes to accompany instructional videos, both for lectures and software demonstrations, as well as code and data files for all examples, often in multiple software programs. Our materials follow a consistent format across classes, ensuring that you know exactly what you will receive when purchasing a new class. Check out some examples here. Many other organizations provide little to no quality control, leaving instructors to their own devices, with the result that classes differ markedly from one another in level and quality and may be either excessively software-centric or inexplicably software free.
Your Access Never Expires and Your Materials are Never Out of Date
Fourth, we offer participants unparalleled access to course materials. What would your reaction be if you bought a brand-new text book and 30 days later the publisher knocked at your door and wrestled it away from you to sell to someone else? It is silly to even envision that scenario, yet this is precisely what most online platforms do when they give you time-limited access to your course. At CenterStat, you get lifetime access to all of your course materials. But we can even do one better: imagine that same text book you bought magically updated itself overnight to the second edition while sitting on your shelf. That is precisely what our evergreen workshops do for you: if we make an update, add a demonstration, or expand a topic, the materials to which you have access are automatically updated to the most recent versions. How cool is that?
Our Commitment to Price Transparency and Lowering Barriers to Access
Finally, we are deeply committed to maintaining a transparent pricing structure that is clearly defined and consistent across classes and instructors and aspires to lower barriers to access where possible. Some online training providers seem to go out of their way to intentionally obfuscate precisely what you are getting for your money. At CenterStat, every course is priced at precisely the same rate per hour of lecture time, and we provide a single summary table of the length and cost of every workshop we offer. Further, we are dedicated to maximizing the access of high-quality quantitative training to as broad an audience as possible and offer significant discounts to current students, as well as students and researchers working and residing in low and lower-middle income countries. And for everyone else, you can join our email list to receive occasional further discounts and promotions. We still need to pay the bills to keep the servers on, but we aspire to work towards disseminating high-quality online training to as broad a global audience as possible.
Our Commitment to You
We sincerely respect anyone who is working to help others improve the quality and replicability of our science and we are glad our competitors exist. At the same time, it is clear that not all online experiences are equal. We founded CenterStat with the commitment of offering the best possible training experience possible at the most affordable price, and we believe that we have achieved this goal. We hope you do as well.