University of the Sunshine Coast

• On-campus students: Loudly and proudly an on-campus university:
  • Only 4.9% of students online in Semester 1, 2019
  • Only 2.2% of students online in Semester 2, 2019
• COVID: Then, in Semester 1 2020… COVID-19 hit
• Transition: In one week, USC transitioned to a 100% online university

SCI110 Science Research Methods

• Level: SCI110 (Science Research Methods) is a first-year statistics course

SCI110 Science Research Methods

• Size: Almost 1400 students over two semesters combined in 2021
• Abilities: Varied mathematics ability
• Disciplines: Students from:
  • Many science disciplines:
    Environmental Management; Animal Ecology; Engineering; Mathematics; etc…
  • Many allied health disciplines (but not psychology…!): Paramedic Science; Biomedical Science; Clincal Exercise Physiology; Dietetics; etc…

SCI110 Science Research Methods

• Red flags:
  • A large course
  • A first-year (and often first-semester) course
  • A course no-one really wants to do (no statistics major)
  • A course with students of varying levels of ability, skills, disciplines, …
  • A course with… MATHS!

Textbooks

• The past: Various textbooks had been tried with mixed success
• Search: However, a textbook was never found that adequately:
  • Covered all the content…
  • At the correct mathematical level…
  • That was not too narrowly focussed on one discipline
• Instead: We relied on comprehensive lecture notes (based on LaTeX) and face-to-face lectures (available post-lecture for viewing)

Why online?

• COVID-19: The COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 moved all students online
  • This exacerbated the lack of a textbook, since no lectures were available
• No lecture policy: USC recently announced no lectures for 2022 onwards:
  • No face-to-face lectures
  • No recorded lectures
• So: A chance to seize the opportunity!

Why open-source?

• So many statistics books already!
  • A Booktopia search for “Statistics”: over 5700 hits…
• Cost: A move for lecturers to adopt free, open-source textbooks, for cost (and other) reasons
• Adaptable: I can make the book cover exactly what I want
• Flexibility: I can change material as, and when, I wish
• Currency: No need to wait for the hard-copy latest edition to be published (with error corrections, etc.)
• Usefulness:
  • Useful for me: Others may add examples, find errors, etc.
  • Useful for others (I hope): Why not make it available for others to take advantage of?

Pedagogical features

• Extra features: Online books can contain all the usual features of hardcopy textbooks… plus more
• Animations: Visual demonstrations of many ideas
• Interactive quizzes, for continual learning
• Interactive exercises, like crosswords
• Recordings, showing how to say the names of, and how to draw, those Greek letters…
• Hide answers: So students can try exercises, but answers are easily accessed

Pedagogical features

• Glossary (hyperlinked to relevant sections, to give context for the term): These are lacking in most statistics textbooks (see Dunn et al. (2017))
• Hyperlinks between important ideas (e.g, what standard error means)
• Look-up tables are easier to use
• Video answers where students can see (and hear) us work through (and talk through) an answer
• External videos: If someone else has a great resource, why not link to it?
• Optional examples can be hidden, so the text does not look dense and overwhelming

Software behind the scenes

• Hosting: All bookdown books can be hosted for free on the bookdown website
• Mathematics: Written using standard LaTeX (reasonably easy to learn)
• Diagrams can be written using R code, or created externally and embedded
• Images can be embedded
• Animations can be written using R code
  • It is not necessary to know how to code in R
  • If you do know R, you can add animations and draw pictures using R

Software behind the scenes

• Open-source: All (?) the software used is open source
• Free: All (?) the software used is free
• Facilitated: The work is facilitated by the R package bookdown
• Writing: The text is written in markdown
  • Easily learnt
  • All files saved as text-only so are easily edited
  • All files are (mostly) human-readable
  • Simple (so not all the Word/LaTeX bells and whistles…)
  • Yet sufficiently powerful: images, tables, maths, glossaries… most of what you’d expect
  • Simplicity allows for easy (!) production of both HTML and PDF versions from the same source document

Writing content

Example: Part of a section about standard deviation

Writing content

Text enclosed in one star is rendered as italics

Writing content

Text enclosed in two stars is rendered as bold

Writing content

Built-in environments: Definitions, Examples, Exercises, …

Writing content

You can make your own environments

Writing content

Mathematics (in LaTeX-style) can be displayed

Writing content

Mathematics (in LaTeX-style) can be in-line

Writing content

Points can be itemised (and enumerated)

Writing content

Software behind the scenes

Software for collaboration

• Reuse:
  • All the textbook code is on GitHub
  • The source files can be used, in whole or in part, by anyone
  • Anyone can alert me to errors
  • Anyone can make improvements, such as extra examples
  • Anyone can grab what is there… and create their own textbook from that
    • Dr Amanda Shaker (La Trobe) is doing that now