Lily Clements from IDEMS International presented One Source, Many Forms: Reimagining Open Statistics Textbooks with PreTeXt at the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) International Conference in Bournemouth. The presentation introduced our ongoing work to bring existing open statistics and data science textbooks into a shared, adaptable ecosystem, making high-quality educational resources easier to reuse, maintain and tailor to different teaching contexts.
At the centre of this work is PreTeXt, an open-source publishing framework that allows textbooks to be produced in multiple formats, including HTML, PDF, ePub and Braille, from a single structured source. We have been converting existing open textbooks into PreTeXt, providing a foundation for developing different versions of the same material, adapted for different software environments, languages, audiences and educational contexts.
The presentation also explored how reusable assessment questions can be integrated into these resources. Our growing collection of over 300 STACK statistics and data science questions offers opportunities to embed interactive, automatically graded exercises across multiple textbooks, without having to recreate them for each resource.
Together, these developments form part of our wider work to create a connected ecosystem of educational resources, where educators can build on existing materials, adapt them to their own needs and contribute improvements that can be shared more widely.