Getting Involved with the OpenIntro Project

• Activity Number: 671
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Thursday, August 4, 2011 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Education
• Author(s): Mine Cetinkaya*+
• Companies: University of California at Los Angeles
• Keywords: open source ; textbook ; statistics education ; introductory statistics ; R ; online

Abstract

OpenIntro:Statistics is a free and open source introductory statistics textbook. The textbook is freely available online, in PDF format, and all of the underlying LaTeX source files are also available under the Creative Commons license. The OpenIntro project has also released online tools such as a question bank and a quiz system that can be used as supplementary materials to OpenIntro:Statistics or other textbooks. Additionally, an R package, openintro, which contains all of the data sets and functions necessary to replicate any of the analyses presented in the book is available on CRAN. Our goal is to provide a set of clean, simple, integrated, and open source tools that the statistics community can use for teaching. What sets OpenIntro apart from traditional textbook packages is that users can tailor any of the components to their needs and make use of content contributed by other statistics educators. We believe that the open source nature of the project will enable it to grow and remain updated. In this talk we will discuss how the statistics community can get involved with OpenIntro as well as provide a brief demonstration of how to use and contribute to the online tools.