Hi Joanne, 

About 4 years ago, we conducted a preliminary review of pre-university maths resources online for engineering and science students (no stats unfortunately).

The things we learned that I think are transferable to your situation are as follows:

Firstly, the professional judgment of experienced advisers is very useful.  We were confident in our professional capability to identify valuable resources.  These tended to be learner-centred materials that guided the reader in an engaging way, starting from the perspective of 'not-knowing' and guiding towards 'knowing'.  There were some genuinely problematic materials where the author's position of 'knowing' seemed to compel them to focus on the formal presentation of a topic, hiding the practical aspect that the reader is actually looking for.  It is almost as if the author was saying "'I will teach this but you must learn something else,' where 'this' is explicitly stated and 'something else' is the responsibility of the learner" (Alagia, 1999 p. 40)

As a result, we tended to focus on resources that didn't make assumptions about the reader's prior knowledge, skills or their understanding of technical terms.  For example this might mean there is some attempts to translate formal maths language into everyday terms (not to diminish the formal but, rather, to prevent it being a barrier to initial access).  Similarly, signposting any 'expected' prior knowledge is useful in a resource as is the inclusion of practical examples.

Finally, however, we found that one of the biggest issues, which led us to refocus the project, was not having control over the resources.  We spent a considerable amount of time analysing what was valuable and what was not only to have some of those resources move, disappear, become inaccessible or simply change so much they no longer suited our purpose.

I hope that is of some help,

Kind regards,

Michael


Michael Cross

Senior Adviser
Academic Skills Advice
University of Bradford
BD7 1DP
Tel: 01274 236863
Tel: 01274 236849 (Information Room)
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Web: www.bradford.ac.uk/academic-skills


Alagia, H. (1999). Mathematicians, Mathematics Teachers and Mathematical Discourse. The Mathematics Educator, 9(2), 38-41.


-----Original Message-----
From: The sigma network for cross-university mathematics and statistics support [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Martin Greenhow
Sent: 16 March 2015 09:37
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: What are your thoughts on online resources for help with teaching statistics?

Dear All,

Not being a statistician, I can only help in one small area, namely Computer-aided assessment. It's probably true to say that CAA systems have less well-developed stats topic areas than those for maths (esp basic algebra and calculus) but we are making progress.

For home-grown systems (I don't know much about commercial systems for stats) the following comments might be useful:
maths e.g. http://www.mathcentre.ac.uk:8081/mathseg/ has a stats section (covering S1 and S2 at A level relly) where some questions link to Excel to do the donkey work Dewis http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/dewis/welcome/index.html links to R Numbas and STACK don't appear to have anything in the public domain e.g. at: http://www.mathcentre.ac.uk/search/?q=Numbas
but I am cc'ing the authors so they can send round outraged emails saying I know nothing!

One thing that will apply to all I think (and certainly to maths e.g.'s Related material link is that whatever you come up with can be included as links in the feedback screens or similar). So this project would be very useful to us (or rather students that want/need to know more). In rder for these links to be included they must be credible i.e. correct and stable (not U-Tube etc. which can be great but is transient!).

So I think the outcomes here will certainly be of great use to all of us.

Best wishes,
Martin



________________________________________
From: The sigma network for cross-university mathematics and statistics support [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Moira Petrie [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 16 March 2015 09:17
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: FW: What are your thoughts on online resources for help with teaching statistics?

Can anyone provide comment as requested below?

Moira



-----Original Message-----
From: learning development in higher education network [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Joanne Ingram
Sent: 13 March 2015 12:05
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: What are your thoughts on online resources for help with teaching statistics?

As you probably know more and more people are turning to free online resources for help with learning in many disciplines.  We particularly see this in the area of statistics where students (and sometimes professionals) may think online resources are a quick fix when they encounter a problem with analysis.  The range of resources available for teaching and learning statistics online is vast.  I am currently engaging in the process of completing a review of as many resources as possible and would be very interested to hear from the teaching and learning community on what makes a resource good or poor.   If you are able it would be great if you could take time to consider the two issues below:

-       Have you ever conducted or come across a review of such resources and if so what criteria were used?
-       Do you have any suggestions for criteria which it would be prudent to include in such a review; in particular any thoughts on criteria which address issues like tests of assumptions, choice of tests, or reporting and interpreting statistics.  Is there anything you think must be included for a resource to be of true value?  Or are there any common misconceptions, the inclusion of which would make a resource poor or even counterproductive.

Hopefully I will be able to publish my review to help the statistics community (in my case with focus on medical statistics) determine which of these resources are actually helpful.

Thank you very much for any comments you may have.

Joanne Ingram
Research Associate in Medical Statistics Centre for Population Health Sciences University of Edinburgh


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