Abstract:

One of the main objectives of the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) is to make emphasis in the students' personal work. Because of this, the use of new technologies of information and communication (NTIC) for distance education is essential. Statistics is a science in which practices with computer are very important. Functional Data Analysis (FDA) is a very recent discipline. For this reason, the main methodologies about FDA are not implemented in the usual statistical programs (like SPSS, STATGRAPHICS, etc...). Different authors have extended the multivariate techniques to the FDA context. So, the aim of this work is to provide to the students a powerful tool to analyze a functional data set. We have carried out an innovator tutorial for working with FDA by using the R project software. R is a powerful free software that allows to implement any mathematical function or algorithm. Moreover, we have used flash technology in order to make a dynamic tutorial about a session of FDA with R. In this tutorial, students can find a complete guide about how to apply FDA methodologies in R step by step. This experience was tested in a virtual course about FDA of the Master in Applied Statistic of the University of Granada (Web http://www.ugr.es/~moea/). This virtual learning environment is based on an online Moodle platform. The results were very positive. We have got that students recognize a functional data set and are able to do a complete statistical study by themselves.

Keywords:

ECTS, Functional Data Analysis, Flash Technology.