Abstract:

Statistics is an increasingly important discipline in the laboratory of human knowledge. Along with information systems, this science is one of the basic pillars of the Information and Knowledge Society, which is undergoing rapid development and is seeking ever greater scope in the human domain of social and natural phenomena, in order to prevent and anticipate them. It is therefore a discipline that cuts across all areas of scientific and technological knowledge. Its learning and uptake by citizens should have been successful. However, its teaching seems to be suffering from a certain lack of success, and this situation knows no bounds, so Angola is no exception. For example, little use of interactive and innovative teaching resources and poor or non-existent statistics laboratories in many institutions.

These difficulties can lead to frustration and demotivation among students, negatively impacting the teaching and learning process in this subject. It is important to seek solutions to overcome these challenges and promote more effective and relevant statistics teaching in Angolan higher education institutions.

For this reason, this study presents the tools and steps for building an online Statistics exercise platform that contributes to the autonomous study of students at an Angolan higher education institution, following the trend of the digital transformation of education.

The aim of this platform is to make up for the lack of interactive and accessible teaching resources and to make it easier to distribute statistics content in an environment where smartphones are highly available, even if internet browsing speeds and availability are low and there are no computers available per student.

It is proposed to develop Open Educational Resources to offer students an interactive and personalized virtual learning environment, which could contribute to student autonomy, cost reduction and the social and economic development of the country, i.e. in line with the principles of Education for Development, as it contributes to the training of critical and autonomous citizens, capable of using statistics to interpret data and make decisions.

The platform is being designed to provide students with an interactive and practical experience in solving statistical problems, promoting active learning and understanding of concepts. Through an intuitive and accessible interface, students have access to a variety of exercises and contextualized problems, allowing them to apply theoretical knowledge to real-world situations. In addition, the platform offers instant feedback and support resources, facilitating self-assessment and individual progress.

The computing environment used is based on the R programming language and bookdown technology which allows publication on websites such as bookdown.org.

A preliminary evaluation reinforces the motivation to build this platform, incorporating more features, content and details.

Keywords:

Digital transformation, education for development, applied statistics, self-study, open education, higher education, Angola.