ShareStats: An open statistics item bank developed by a community of instructors in higher education

Abstract

Gaining knowledge of statistics is important in most (under)graduate programs within the social and behavioral sciences and requires repeated study by students, highlighting the need for good practice materials. We describe the development of an open item bank of statistics exercises by a community of instructors from Dutch universities: the ShareStats project. We describe how we developed the item bank by reusing existing statistics exercises from various institutions. The 5000+ exercises are in Dutch or English and are all quality-checked, categorized, and shared under a Creative Commons License in a single format, which allows for easy export to online learning and testing systems. We describe how we built a professional community of statistics instructors in the Netherlands, which was actively involved in developing the item bank. By continuing to invest in the online item bank and the professional community, we aim to inspire other educators to contribute to open educational resources.