Last week, David and Lily participated in the 13th International Conference on Teaching Statistics (ICOTS13) in Brisbane, Australia, contributing six presentations across the week. Our talks explored a range of topics, from scaling statistics education in low-resource contexts and rethinking the role of mathematics and coding in data science, to automated assessment and new approaches to developing adaptable educational resources.
A central theme of our contributions was how statistics and data science education can become more accessible, relevant and adaptable to different teaching contexts. We shared work from our collaborations in Kenya and West Africa, including approaches to teaching statistics from the data up, alongside our ongoing development of open, adaptive statistics and data science textbooks. These resources build on the idea that high-quality educational materials should be reusable and adaptable, allowing educators to work with different examples, software, assessments, and local contexts without starting from scratch.
The conference also provided opportunities to connect with textbook authors, educators and researchers interested in developing these ideas further. Conversations with authors whose textbooks are already part of our growing PreTeXt collection opened up possibilities for collaboration, while discussions around STACK assessment, AI-assisted teaching, and textbook variants raised new questions about how educational resources can evolve as technology changes.
Beyond the presentations, we began exploring opportunities for wider collaboration, including discussions around accreditation of adaptable educational resources.
The papers from the presentations will be in the conference proceedings in due course, but in the meantime, they can also be found here:
What’s Fundamental: Mathematics, Coding, Data?
Teaching Statistics from the Data Up
Shifting the Paradigm: A context-based approach to teaching statistics in West Africa