CourseKata

CourseKata is a community of educators, students, researchers, designers, and developers who are inspired by the opportunity to improve teaching and learning in K12 and higher education classrooms. We develop interactive, online textbooks centered on better, more modern ways to approach student learning:

• Connections + Coherence → Knowledge Transfer: We believe students learn best when they build connections as they learn, making their knowledge more coherent. Coherence results in flexible problem solving that can be applied to new situations and prepare students for more advanced learning
• A Continuous Improvement Movement: As students use our textbooks, we study the implementation and learning and apply improvement methodologies to continuously improve our materials and their use. Improvements are no longer isolated to single classrooms, but instead are shared across all users of the materials
• Active Learning Environments: We create student-centered, engaged, and active learning environments with a focus on creating platforms and tools that teachers can easily adapt with lessons that are relevant to the unique students in their classrooms
• A Community of Educators Who Think Differently: We are more than a textbook or a curriculum. We are a community of teachers/instructors who are inspired by the opportunity to improve teaching and learning in their classrooms. These teachers/instructors participate in professional development, have access to each other through online forums, and are actively creating and sharing adapted materials with one another
• Affordability: As a non-profit organization, we are committed to providing our textbooks and curricula to educational settings with a range of budgets by pricing our materials at an accessible pricepoint

CourseKata has developed our first online product, a Statistics and Data Science curriculum that includes an online textbook, an extensive library of online materials, top-notch professional development, and a Jupyter Notebook platform where teachers can easily create their own materials for their students. This textbook has been used in college classrooms since 2018 and in high schools since 2020.

We are currently in the process of adapting our Statistics and Data Science curriculum with a focus on creating versions for classrooms where students balance in-class and out-of-class learning, classrooms where student learning primarily happens in-class, and educational settings where students are working completely independently without instructor-led components. We have also begun piloting micro textbooks, partnering with instructors/teachers to create niche textbooks on our learning platform. In the coming years we aim to build a suite of online, interactive textbooks for high school and college settings that help students learn complex topics while igniting their curiosity in the world around them.

We are actively adapting our Statistics and Data Science curriculum to better serve diverse learning environments: hybrid classrooms where students balance in-class and out-of-class learning, in-class-focused settings, and fully independent learning scenarios without instructor-led components. Additionally, we have started piloting micro-textbooks in collaboration with instructors and teachers, creating specialized resources on our learning platform. Over the next few years, our goal is to develop a comprehensive suite of online, interactive textbooks for high school and college students—resources designed not only to help learners master complex concepts but also to spark their curiosity about the world around them.