Day 1. Read the rest of this blog post. Optional: It may be helpful to identify when you will have time on each of the next 6 days. For example, commit the 10 minutes right after you get back to your desk from lunch on each day.

Day 2. Download one free textbook, and identify 2 sections from the book’s table of contents that overlap with your class. Here are links to a few of the many available free textbooks: OpenIntro Statistics (more info), Collaborative Statistics (more info), and many others.

Day 3. Briefly skim each of the two sections you identified on Day 2, spending just 5 minutes on each.

Day 4. Pleased with the sections you reviewed? Email your current students a link to the free textbook, or tell them about it in class. Not keen on the book’s explanations, style, or other characteristics? Send David an email and briefly explain why. Your comments are useful for helping these resources improve.

Day 5. Watch the video about free OpenIntro course software (see the gray banner on openintro.org). The video is 13 minutes, so feel free to cut it short to stay under your 10 minute quota.

Day 6. Register as a teacher on openintro.org (formal verification optional) and create a course with your new account. This process should take no more than 10 minutes. We send emails every 1-2 months to keep instructors up-to-date on OpenIntro and other open resources, but you can opt out anytime.

Day 7. Browse other resources that are available on this Links page. We think you’ll like what you see, and we hope you continue exploring and using these resources. You can always contact us if you want more information. We are also happy to set up phone calls with teachers who interested in learning more about OpenIntro and other open resource projects.

Congratulations, you already completed Day 1!

We’re pleased to share recent news about exciting software developments and broad outreach programs to kick off 2012!

A new version of our free online course management software was released earlier this month. The software now supports four subjects (statistics, algebra, calculus, and physics), and has dozens of other new features. Instructors can manage multiple course simultaneously with class announcements, customizable homepages, and a clean new Question Bank interface. For those who like their mathematics extra fancy, the Question Bank now supports LaTeX notation for equations. Check out our YouTube video for a tour of the latest developments at openintro.org:

This semester also marks our first major outreach effort for OpenIntro Statistics, which we extend to you and your colleagues. If you are already using OpenIntro Statistics in your class, thanks! If you or your colleagues are using an alternative statistics book, we hope you will participate. (1) Request your students to read one section of our textbook during the semester along with the corresponding reading in the course’s regular textbook. (2) Then ask them to fill out an online survey comparing the OpenIntro textbook to their current textbook. (Send us an email and we’ll get back to you with the a link to the appropriate survey.) We hope this will enhance the students’ learning and help us continue to improve OI resources for you and folks around the world.

Thanks for all your support, and best wishes for 2012!

Cheers,
The Openintro Team

OpenIntro was started when we were students, and that gives us a different take on things. We believe it is possible, and important, to deliver top quality educational tools to everybody who wants them. Our book, website, labs, quizzes, and other resources are available for free, because we want to help people for whom the cost of educational materials is a burden. This makes cost-sensitive students, especially those of community and state colleges, a key audience for us.

From a stylistic perspective, while the textbook is thorough and rigorous, it was also written to make statistics accessible to students who struggle with quantitative subjects. There has been a steady flow of feedback from students who picked up our book on a whim after struggling with a concept presented in their current text or elsewhere on the web. They tell us how happy they are with the simplicity and clarity of how topics were introduced and explained, and we are thrilled to get these reports. This book was written based on our experience teaching and tutoring people of all ages, backgrounds, and enthusiasm levels with the precise goal of being accessible to everybody, especially people for whom statistics doesn’t come easily.

So, in response to recent feedback, we say Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us, and

• Teachers: We understand that jumping to a new textbook is a big leap in confidence. If this makes you nervous (e.g. you are worried your students won’t like the book), OpenIntro Statistics is the perfect textbook to give a try-out. The book is free to download and cheap to buy, so use the book as a supplement and let your students know you are thinking about a switch. Then ask students for their feedback throughout the course. If they like the old textbook better, no harm done — go back to the old text (we also hope you will let us know how we can improve, since we are here to create products that best serve you and your students!). But if the students like OpenIntro Statistics better, then you have the opportunity to switch over without fear. This is one of the many great features of free and open source resources.
• If you are a student, try using OpenIntro Statistics as a companion for your class. If you find the book useful, let your teacher know (in a friendly “this was a great resource that I found very useful and you might want to check out for future classes” way, i.e. please don’t be demanding of teachers on this topic since switching textbooks is no small amount of work for teachers). If you don’t like some parts of the book or have suggestions, we’d love to hear from you. Our goal is to maximize the value of students’ eduction, and we want to learn how to improve.

Always Yours,
OpenIntro

Below is a summary of what is new this month:

• Manage Course. Teachers may specify a time zone and view a list of registered students.
• Quiz Utility. Quiz timers are defaulted to 30 minutes but are adjustable in the range of 15-60 minutes. Instructors may also, if they desire, prevent students from taking a quiz more than once (but students may still view the quiz). Instructors may also view a summary of student performance. Students may review their performance on quizzes, which we hope will aid in studying.
• Question Bank. The end-of-chapter-exercises from three additional book chapters have been entered into the Public Question Bank.
• Archiving. By the end of a course, instructors will have dozens of elements that they have distributed to students but that they may no longer wish to see on their homepage. To this end, we offer an Archive option, which allows instructors to hide quizzes, assignments, labs, and links that have already been posted. These archived elements are remain easily accessible on the instructor’s homepage by the Show Archived button (shown when at least one element is archived). Note that archiving has no influence on the appearance of student pages.
• Highlighting Deadlines. Quiz, Assignment, and Lab due dates are now highlighted on students homepages when the due date is within 3 days, which will help students manage fast-approaching deadlines.

We have also posted a Labs page that will stage the release of labs in R and RStudio this fall. The first labs will be released later this month, and eight labs and their source are scheduled for release before the start of 2012 classes.

Early in the program Chris Barr gave a talk titled “Beyond the Textbook: Dynamic Approaches in Statistics Education”, in which he highlighted the importance and potential for new technologies in statistics education and beyond. Blogs, free software, social networks, videos, and (of course) OpenIntro were all on the list. Above all, Chris stressed the importance of integrating resources. As he put it: “The future is coming from all directions. Our greatest opportunity is harnessing and unifying the amazing potential of these resources.” Chris’ presentation was part of a panel discussion with other innovators in textbooks and teaching: Webster West from Texas A&M and Rebekah Isaak from the University of Minnesota each presented on alternatives. Webster described the potential for e-books to bring together resources in an interactive way, and Rebekah discussed efforts from her team to help students as they gradually build their own books throughout the semester. These are two great ideas!  The last speaker was our friend Rob Gould. He highlighted the importance of traditional books, and the opportunities for new approaches. At one point he remarked “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many authors of introductory statistics textbooks in one room… I support diversity. I wish I could see more authors!” With ample opportunities for contributions from everyone in the community, we couldn’t agree more!

On the last day of the conference Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel gave a talk titled “Getting involved with OpenIntro” where she gave a brief demonstration of how to use and contribute to the online tools such as the question bank and quizzes. The audience was excited about the opportunity to be able to share questions amongst themselves via the online question bank, which is a perk other course management systems with a quiz feature do not provide. This presentation was a part of a session on online and open source teaching. Anna Helga Jonsdottir from University of Iceland talked about another free and open source web-based application called tutor-web. This application allows for a dynamic online quiz where the questions are randomly selected based on the student’s performance. If the student is doing well, the questions on the quiz get progressively more difficult. If not, simpler questions are selected until the system points the student to review certain topics. Both the back-end and the user experience of this application are rather impressive, and we were happy to see that researchers all over the world are contributing to open source education.

• two labs, built specifically for use with RStudio (update: we are going to post these in mid-September after they have gotten one final trial in a course),
• an expanded Question Bank, including all textbook exercises and a selection of new Quiz Ready questions, and
• new course management options for teachers to assist in organization.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

The Preliminary Edition of OpenIntro Statistics was used in three unique courses at two separate universities during the 2010-2011 academic year, and we’re on track to reach even more students this year. In support of the project, we’ve released the First Edition, which weighs in at 370 pages and costs $9.02 on Amazon (39% increase in content). The PDF remains free under a Creative Commons license (see Rights), and we’ll be releasing the book’s source later this week on the Statistics Downloads page.

OpenIntro Statistics includes new material in each of the seven original chapters, plus a completely new chapter on multiple regression and one-way ANOVA (developed in May and June). The text and exercises continue to grow in quantity and quality. We’re excited to offer this textbook as a free download and at a zero-profit price through Amazon. We’re very grateful to several people who provided valuable feedback during the final months of development and revision: Andrew Bray, Dalene Stangl, Dave Harrington, Jan de Leeuw, Kevin Rader, Philippe Rigollet, and Rob Gould.

We’ve timed the development of the new website to coincide with the First Edition of OpenIntro Statistics, and our new web presence represents the professional quality expected of OpenIntro. This 2.0 version of the website was designed by Meenal Patel, our team’s graphic designer, and it offers much greater structure for public content. Importantly, we now also offer a new private section that includes online course management software. User accounts are free for teachers, students, and anyone else interested.

Teachers can manage a course and its content through the website using an efficient and powerful interface on their personal homepage. A teacher can create Quizzes, Assignments, Labs*, and Links by filling out a short form, and then distribute those elements to student homepages with just a couple mouse clicks. To create Quizzes and Assignments, teachers select questions from our large and fast-growing Question Bank, or teachers can create and use their own questions from their Private Question Bank.

It has been a fantastic year for OpenIntro development. All online content remains free, and paperback copies of OpenIntro Statistics are incredibly affordable. As we grow, we’ll continue to develop open source and free tools that meet the highest standards.

* Lab uploading privileges are currently restricted to verified teachers, but verification is simple and free.

We are also developing a new website — openintro.org “2.0″ — with a new look and expanded utilities. These features will also be released in (late) July. Meenal, our team’s graphic designer, has been developing the layout of the new website, setting the bar high for the visual appeal and layout of the site, and we are working hard on the back-end programming. We will be rolling out lite public versions of these components in July, and we are recruiting teachers who would like to trial additional features of the site this fall in their courses (teachers, please contact us if this might be of interest to you).

Chapters 2 and 6 gained new material. New subsections in 2.5 introduce linear combinations of random variables. Often times we model random variables as the sum or linear combination of other random variables, and these subsections describe how we characterize the properties of these combinations. Section 6.3 was also released, and it describes small sample inference using simulation and exact methods for a single proportion.

New exercises have been added to Chapter 2, nearly doubling the number originally available in the Preliminary Edition of the textbook. Several exercises have also been updated.

Solutions to odd-numbered exercises to Chapters 1 and 2 have been posted on the Downloads page. We will continue to release the solutions to odd-numbered exercises for later chapters throughout February.

The backbone of a Question Bank and Quiz Utility have been constructed. While the number of questions available is currently limited, the current tools offer a taste of the capabilities that will be rolled out over the next many months. We encourage instructors interested in testing beta components of the system to contact us. Use of the online components is free and can be used in conjunction with other textbooks.