Distance Teaching of Statistics to Undergraduates at the Open University / Java Applications for Teaching Statistics

Distance Teaching of Statistics to Undergraduates at the Open University: At the beginning of this academic year, February 2002, there were 27,817 registrations on courses run by the Faculty of Mathematics and Computing. This figure includes post- graduate students and students registered in Singapore. Of these, 7,055 registrations were for level one entry courses and 1,863 registrations were for level two and level three statistics courses. The ages of our students range from 18 to those who are over 65. As an example, the following chart shows the age profile of students registered on M246 Elements of Statistics for the February 2002 presentation of the course…The articles gives an overview of the distance learning and teaching at the Open University…./… Java Applications for Teaching Statistics: M248 Analysing Data is a new introductory statistics course presented by the Open University from 2003. As the course title suggests, the emphasis is on learning statistics through analysing data rather than mathematics. MINITAB will be provided for data analysis, but it was decided to develop further software to support the teaching of more difficult statistical concepts. In the past the OU has developed such software in the C++ programming language. For this course, however, it was decided to develop the software in Java….