This technical report describes the statistical method of expectation maximization (EM) for parameter estimation. Several of 1D, 2D, 3D and n-D examples are presented in this document. Applications of the EM method are also demonstrated in the case of mixture modeling using interactive Java applets in 1D (e.g., curve fitting), 2D (e.g., point clustering and classification) and 3D (e.g., brain tissue classification).

Outline: 1. What is SOCR (Statistics Online Computational Resource)? 2. Background on effectiveness of applets in teaching probability? 3. Quasi-experiment: Effects of SOCR on student learning, satisfaction and use of technology. 4. Conclusions and comments on other experiments we have done.

The Statistics Online Computational Resource (www.SOCR.ucla.edu) provides one of the largest collections of free Internet-based resources for probability and statistics education. SOCR develops, validates and disseminates two core types of materials – instructional resources and computational libraries.

This book contains instructional materials, pedagogical techniques and hands-on activities for technology-enhanced science education. These educational resources were presented at the 2009 SOCR Continuing Statistics Education Workshop entitled “It's Online, Therefore it Exists! 2009 SOCR Continuing Statistics Education Training & Development Workshop,” which took place at the University of California, Los Angeles, August 10-12, 2009. This book was written to provide modern pedagogical perspective into technology-enhanced blended learning and instruction. It reflects the direction of amalgamation of knowledge from multiple disciplines with recent open networking and technological advances. This trend is anticipated to accelerate in the next decade with seamless integration of open-access data, learning materials, computational resources and collaborative environments connected via language, platform and geo-politically agnostic interfaces. There are four novel features of this book – it is community-built, completely free-open-access (in terms of use and contributions), blends concepts with technology and it is electronically available online in multilingual format. This book covers the narrow scientific area of probability and statistics education; however, the principles we promote in the book can easily be extended to all other science and technology fields.

The 2010 SOCR Advanced Placement (AP) training, continuing education and development workshop will extend the efforts of the 2007 SOCR/CAUSEway workshop and the 2009 SOCR Continuing Education workshop. The aims of this workshop are to demonstrate the functionality, utilization and assessment of the current SOCR resources in the AP statistics curricula. The SOCR Motto It's Online, Therefore it Exists! clearly indicates that all of these tools, activities and materials are freely available over the Internet to the entire community. This workshop will be of most value to AP teachers and college instructors of probability and statistics classes who have interests in exploring novel technology-enhanced approaches for statistics education. The workshop will provide an interactive forum for exchange of ideas and recommendations for strategies to integrate computers, modern pedagogical techniques, the Internet and new student assessment techniques.

The 2007 joint SOCR/CAUSEway continuing education workshop demonstrates the functionality, utilization and assessment of the current SOCR (http://www.SOCR.ucla.edu) and CAUSEweb (www.CAUSEweb.org) resources. The workshop and this handbook are most value to advance placement (AP) teachers and college instructors of probability and statistics classes who have interests in exploring novel IT-based approaches for enhancing statistics education. This handbook provides the complete Workshop program (http://wiki.stat.ucla.edu/socr/index.php/SOCR_Events_Aug2007) and instructional materials presented by the Workshop instructors. New strategies for integration of computers, modern pedagogical approaches, the Internet and new student assessment techniques are presented on the handbook.

SOCRE Goals: Interactive Virtual Experimentation and Probability Modeling. Hands-on Distribution Modeling. Model Fitting and Statistical Analysis. Data Interrogation and Visualization. Statistics Online Tutorial. Additional Remote Statistics Education and Computational Tools.