Notes on this edition

CUNY’s School of Professional Studies’ version of Concepts in Statistics is a replication of a highly interactive, openly licensed textbook first offered under a CC-BY license by the Online Learning Initiative. We built our copy from Lumen Learning’s openly licensed version, which attributes the OLI and a handful of other sources, as noted on each page of the textbook.

We chose to replicate this Open Educational Resource (OER) to facilitate use and adaptations by faculty at CUNY SPS and around the world. If you choose to adopt or adapt the course, we hope you’ll read through these notes to identify opportunities for greater open practice, improvement, and customization.

Organization

This version of Concepts in Statistics preserves the organization of the original with two exceptions. First, all module assignments are now located at the end of the textbook rather than in the modules themselves. This choice was made to allow instructors to decide which assignments to offer. These assignments include data sets still linked to the Lumen originals. Second, the Lumen version offers six StatTutor explorations to support student learning that are not included here.

Ideas for OER, Open Pedagogy, and DEIA Practice

If your institution has a Pressbooks network, you can clone this text and take full advantage of its open license and potential for open pedagogy. You might choose to:

• Alter the examples, images, and names to reflect greater diversity (we have already altered a few names and pronouns)
• Add examples or provide text to address the issue of gender represented solely as binary in this text, its data sets, and data collection in general
• Invite students to edit, critique, or publicly annotate the text, especially for chapters whose data explores race, gender, or body image
• Invite students to take advantage of Pressbooks’ glossary function to create a glossary for each chapter
• Invite students to create and share openly licensed question sets, discussion questions, or other ancillary materials to accompany the text
• Share your revisions as OER

Known Accessibility Issues

As a highly interactive and adapted text, this Pressbooks edition includes some inherited accessibility issues that we are currently unable to address:

• Missing or inadequate alt text. While alt text is provided for most images, not all provide enough detail for students to process meaningfully the visual representation of data. The simulations and image-reliant H5P interactives do not include alt text.
• LaTeX use. We have rendered mathematical formulas and expressions using Pressbooks’ LaTeX editor, which we believe makes them screen-reader accessible via MathJax. However, those formulas will not be screen-reader friendly if students are using the Pressbooks-generated PDF of the text or are investigating H5P interactives, where the equation editor is unavailable.

We welcome the assistance of subject matter experts willing to write alt text for any of our images or simulations. Please feel free to learn more about the challenge of writing alt text for data visualizations, W3C’s recommendations for writing alt text for complex images, and the POET training tool for writing alt text for math images. If you are willing to share alt text of images or simulations with us, please reach out to facultysupport@sps.cuny.edu.

Simulation Use

Concepts in Statistics includes over 40 simulations that are integral to student learning and in some cases required in order to complete the interactive questions in the text. They are directly embedded in the Pressbooks pages and links are provided to view them in a separate tab. (For phone users, note that these simulations were built to be responsive in landscape view.)

We copied the source code for these simulations from the openly licensed Lumen source. We have stored these simulations in an open GitHub repository hosted by the Office for Faculty Development and Instructional Technology at CUNY’s School of Professional Studies. We were unsuccessful in copying two sims (Distribution of Sample Means 1 of 4 and Distribution of Sample Proportions 1 of 6), so those remain linked to the Lumen versions. One sim (Another Look at Probability) was offered via Geogebra and remains so. However, copies of the source files for all three of these sims are available on our GitHub repository, in case you want to tinker and succeed where we didn’t.

Ancillary Materials

Please feel free to adopt or adapt our MyOpenMath course associated with this text book or the Quizlet sets built out for vocabulary support of most chapters. You will need to sign up for a free account on each platform to access the materials.

Feedback

Please reach out to us if you’d like to provide feedback or share any remixes or materials to improve our version of this textbook. We are available at facultysupport@sps.cuny.edu.