The lecturer or instructor has to make an effort to use innovative ways of teaching to capture students' attention and make the learning process become more enjoyable and effective. For external participants, the course fee is 260 euro per ECTS credit.The methods of teaching in class are also affected with the rise of technology used in education. Please note that the number of places for this course is limited.
To register, please fill in the registration form and e-mail it to four weeks prior to the start of the course. More information and detailed timetables can be found here.ĮRIM PhD candidates and Research Master students can register for this course via SIN Online.Įxternal (non-ERIM) participants are welcome to this course. (The same holds for all other PLS software, as far as I know.) If you do not have a laptop you will need to share one with another participant during the practice session.
The reason is that the university’s IT security policy does not allow files of the type that SmartPLS is, to be installed on computers in the PC labs.
Second, you ought to install the SmartPLS program on your own laptop computer if you have one, and bring this computer with you to the afternoon practice sessions. However, it is no longer supported and you will need to obtain approval from the SmartPLS administrators before you can use it (this approval is typically given within one or two days). It has fewer options than the newer version (particularly, no Consistent PLS and no Confirmatory Tetrad Analysis), but works fine. If you decide later on that you will use SmartPLS in your research, but don’t want to pay €400 a year, you can also switch to the older version. It will be possible to switch between versions later on. A version of the example data set with 100 cases will be available, so the student version should work.
Another data set, plus the corresponding structural and measurement models, will also be made available. Participants who want to use their own data should preferably have at least some ideas about (1) the structural model they want to test (i.e., which constructs are related to which other constructs) and (2) which indicators measure each of the constructs (the so-called measurement model). Participants are encouraged to bring with them a data set that they are using in their own research, which they can then use to test a PLS structural equation model. It is assumed that participants have basic knowledge of multivariate statistical methods, such as multiple regression and factor analysis.
The aims of this course are (1) to understand the basic intuition behind PLS, (2) to be able to apply the technique in testing a structural equation model, and (3) to be able to interpret the results. In such cases, PLS is far less likely to lead to inappropriate solutions or non-convergence. Partial Least Squares (PLS) path modeling is a structural equation modeling technique which is especially suitable when the assumptions for applying Maximum Likelihood based techniques (such as LISREL) do not apply, like in the case of exploratory research or small samples.