Open educational resources for statistics teaching

Abstract

A series of papers at this conference have built on the African Data Initiative (ADI) which was started to improve statistical literacy and understanding. One immediate deliverables of this initiative has been new statistical software which is free, easy-to-use, open source and which encourages good statistical practice. Here we show how this software together with other open educational resources can be used to improve statistics teaching. This is demonstrated using an undergraduate course which was offered to about 300 students at Maseno University, Kenya. The resources include those from an e-learning course, called e-SMS (Statistics Made Simple) and an electronic statistics book called Computer Assisted Statistics Textbook (CAST). The course also made extensive use of Moodle to enable a “blended” approach to be undertaken.