Abstract

Open educational resources (OERs) provide opportunities for educators to develop and adapt teaching materials to suit different courses, disciplines, and student needs. However, as the number of resources grows, maintaining consistency, avoiding duplication, and ensuring that materials remain accessible and reusable become increasingly challenging. Educators often need to combine and adapt content from multiple resources to suit specific subject matter, course structures, languages of instruction, software environments, and local or cultural contexts. Developing such materials independently, or assembling and adapting content from existing resources, can still require considerable time and effort.

At the University of Toronto Mississauga, we have developed open-access textbooks in applied statistics, biomathematics and biostatistics, and mathematical and statistical oncology. The electronic textbook in our applied statistics course in particular is part of a larger course redevelopment project where faculty partner with undergraduate students to develop an interactive e-book, tutorials, quizzes, lecture slides, and other learning materials. These components are developed using open-source tools, maintained through GitHub repositories, and shared with the broader education community.

These projects provide practical examples of how open educational resources can be developed for different audiences and educational contexts through student–faculty collaboration. Involving students as active partners in creating and refining these materials also brings their perspectives as learners into the development process. However, managing related resources as separate materials rather than as interconnected components presents challenges for adaptation and reuse. A variant-based approach offers opportunities for faculty and students to collaboratively adapt existing content, including examples, datasets, assessments, and computational activities, to suit different courses and student needs while maintaining connections to the original resources.

In this talk, we present examples from our textbook and course development projects, discuss our experiences with student–faculty collaboration, and explore how modular development and variant-based approaches can support a more structured, maintainable, and adaptable ecosystem of open statistics education resources.