Proposal Description

Open educational resources (OERs) for statistics and data science have exploded in recent years. This explosion reflects genuine enthusiasm and innovation from the global statistics education community, but abundance alone is not enough. Navigating this landscape of hundreds of resources has become increasingly difficult, yet we do not need fewer resources, we need more. The more we have, the more important it becomes that they are structured, curated, and connected.

This session presents a vision and a system for doing exactly that. Building on foundational innovation from IDEMS International, we introduce a variant-based framework that gives communities ownership and control over open textbooks and educational materials. Rather than treating each resource as a standalone product, our approach conceives of open textbooks as living, forkable artefacts that are adaptable, for example to different audiences, languages, software environments, geographical contexts, pedagogical approaches, and institutional needs. Yet, these artefacts still remain part of a coherent, navigable ecosystem.

Ayse Biglin will chair the session. As a former president of IASE, Ayse brings deep experience in statistics education and a broad international perspective that will anchor the session's themes within the wider landscape of the discipline.

There are four confirmed speakers:

- Dr Lily Clements will present the technical architecture underpinning the variant system: the infrastructure that enables open textbooks to be adapted, extended, and shared at scale. This includes how AI agents, with humans firmly in the loop, make this level of adaptation feasible while keeping authorship and subject expertise central.
- Dr David Stern will present on transforming education through reusable variants of open educational resources. He will frame the broader potential of this approach for statistics education globally, with particular relevance for under-resourced settings.
- Professor Nathan Favero, Associate Professor of Public Administration and Policy at American University, will speak on how open licensing enabled a path to textbook authorship, illustrating how adaptable OERs lower the barrier to contribution and allow educators to build far more than they might have imagined starting from scratch.
- Christian Martinez, data scientist, educator, and open-source developer at CUNY, will present "The Accidental Author". This is his teaching approach in which student assignments are transformed from disposable tasks into renewable OER contributions, illustrating how the variant ecosystem can extend beyond traditional authorship to make students themselves active participants in open education.

Together, these talks make the case that we can transform a wealth of isolated resources into a structured, living, and continually expanding ecosystem. Community ownership is key: this is not a centralised repository but a system designed to empower educators and learners to adapt, extend, and share materials while contributing back to a common infrastructure. We hope this session will spark collaboration across the international statistics education community and showcase work directly relevant to the ISI's goals of expanding statistical capacity worldwide.