Online Statistics Education: A Multimedia Course of Study

This is a collaborative effort led by David Lane of Rice University. The core material is an interactive textbook that is best used over the Internet to take advantage of the embedded questions created in JavaScript. The PDF version that can be downloaded simply shows the answers in a different font following the questions.An attractive feature of Online Statistics is the suite of case studies making use of the actual data from published studies in the scientific literature and popular media. The data sets for the case studies are provided as Excel files. The website also provides some computational tools running in the browser for the statistical calculations needed for the analysis of the case studies, although instructors may prefer to use free software such as R or software already available at their institutions.Also part of the course is a set of 31 simulations illustrating key concepts such as the meaning of a 95% confidence interval. Some are written in JavaScript and run without difficulty, but others are written in Java and may present a problem because of the security concerns surrounding Java applets running in browsers.