StatsCapybara: an open statistics curriculum for the course students fearmost

Open Research objectives/practices

• Making the outputs of research freely available
• Using open collaborative methods and tools
• Capitalizing on unique open aspects of open educational resources
• Promoting and facilitating Open Research and Education practices

Introduction

StatsCapybara (statscapybara.com) is a free, openly licensed, interactive curriculum for undergraduate statistics; the course students across departments fear most, and one with some of the highest in failure rates. It is live, in active use in my teaching, and built as an open educational resource from the ground up. Students love it.

Everything about it is open. The lessons, practice problems and datasets are released under CC BY 4.0; the code that runs the site is MIT-licensed. The full source lives in a public GitHub repository with a CITATION.cff so the work can be cited and reused, and the site carries no paywall, no sign-up and no ads. Anyone can teach from it, translate it, remix it into their own materials, or fork the whole thing. It is built with plain, open web technologies and hosted for free on GitHub Pages, which keeps it lightweight, fast and sustainable for the foreseeable future.

The pedagogy is simulation-first: rather than static formulas, students drag and manipulate until a concept appears, becomes concrete, and starts to make sense. The homepage makes it clear on the first visit: "drag me to spread out the capybara population". It's all about interactive and "light-hearted" learning.

The curriculum spans eight courses across two tracks, The Statistics Core and The Research Toolkit, with 102 interactive lessons running from descriptive statistics through to Bayesian, causal and multilevel models, alongside a toolbox of test-choosers, calculators, datasets, flashcards and quizzes. A capybara mascot and plain-language writing set the tone: statistics you can see, touch and understand.

Motivation

I built StatsCapybara.com for the students I teach at University College Groningen,then opened it to everyone, for reasons that reinforce each other. Statistics is intimidating and a disproportionate share of students fail it or simply find it daunting. I am a visual learner, and as a student the ideas only truly clicked when I found the rare, well-made interactive explanation online. I wanted my students to have that experience reliably, not by luck. Working at the intersection of psychology, biology and engineering, I can both build the simulations and verify that the statistics behind them is correct; so I finally have something to show in class beyond static images and waving my hands in the air to "demonstrate" a distribution.

Making it open was deliberate. A free, no-sign-up resource removes the cost and access barriers that hit hardest the students who already struggle most, wherever they are. An open license lets other educators reuse, translate and adapt the material instead of rebuilding it, and lets me integrate statistics with the other courses I teach, so students experience research as one connected package rather than parts in isolation. Releasing the source and hosting it free on GitHub keeps the project transparent, forkable and cheap enough to last. And because I have checked every explanation myself, I have one safe place to send students, and that with an approachable mascot and a few quips to ease the anxiety I see in class.

The impact is already real and global. In less than two months (August-September), StatsCapybara.com has reached over 200 learners from more than 30 countries, on all six inhabited continents — from Groningen and Boston to Istanbul, Shanghai, Melbourne and Lagos. Students I will never meet, in departments I will never visit, are learning from a resource anyone is free to keep, share and improve.

URLs, references and further information

Primary references — all public, functioning and openly accessible

• Live resource: https://www.statscapybara.com
• Open-source repository (public; code MIT, content CC BY 4.0; includes `CITATION.cff`): https://github.com/hkarsilar/Stats-Site-V1
• Licensing statement: https://statscapybara.com/license.html
• Author (University of Groningen research portal): https://research.rug.nl/en/persons/hakan-karsilar/

Further information:

• Licences: teaching material CC BY 4.0; site code MIT. Reuse, translation, remixing and forking are explicitly permitted; a `CITATION.cff` is provided for attribution.
• Access & sustainability: free, no sign-up, no ads; works offline after first visit; hosted at zero cost on GitHub Pages, so it can be maintained indefinitely.
• Scale: 8 courses / 102 interactive lessons* across two tracks (The Statistics Core; The Research Toolkit), plus an open toolbox (test-choosers, calculators, datasets, flashcards, quizzes). *Number of lessons will likely increase in the future.
• Reach (Google Analytics): 200+ active users from 30+ countries, on all six inhabited continents (first couple of months, and growing).