Multimedia Statistical Labs & Toolkit (TILE)

The potential for multimedia to enhance the statistics curriculum is clear, but how to develop instructional materials that take advantage of the riches that multimedia has to offer is not as transparent. It requires more than a simple translation of textbooks into HTML and statistical software into Java in order to obtain a product that is functional, effective, and artful. Accepted definitions of good design and good educational paradigms do not necessarily hold in the new digital media. In this article we would like to consider ways in which multimedia can augment the statistics curriculum. We will provide examples drawn from our efforts to design instructional labs for use in teaching introductory statistics to university students who are non-science majors. We also describe a general collection of tools we have developed to build these types of labs. For further information on our project, Tools for an Interactive Learning Environment (TILE), see www.stat.berkeley.edu/users/nolan/TILE.