Switching To Data Science Field
Welcome to the site!

As you have mentioned that you are an Instructor of Statistics I think you can directly start with different methodologies/techniques available. 

As @Emre has suggested it would be better if you can work on different project available on Kaggle, Analytics Vidya. You would be exposed to most of the necessary things in Data Science field. Following R-Bloggers, will expose you to the latest packages. Ofcourse following Data Science Exchange.

You can doing small projects on different datasets on UCI. For experimenting using different techniques.

These are just couple of things which would help you to be updated.

Follow them for atlest next 2-3 months then you can access yourself.