CAUSE will host the Electronic Conference On Teaching Statistics (eCOTS) from May 14-18, 2012. Just like the United States Conference On Teaching Statistics (USCOTS), eCOTS has been designed to focus on undergraduate-level statistics education (including AP Statistics), with a target audience of statistics teachers. Whereas USCOTS is held in odd-numbered years, eCOTS will occur during even-numbered years and seeks to provide a virtual meeting space for educators to share ideas, teaching methods, and research results. It is hoped that eCOTS will be a forum where statistics educators from around the world can network and connect as they learn how to incorporate new ideas, methods, and resources into their existing courses or programs.

The format of the conference will be as follows. On May 14-16, there will be 20 to 30 minute webinars by invited and peer reviewed session leaders. There will be approximately four of these webinars each day. Conference registrants are encouraged to attend the webinars as they are underway to ask questions and interact with the session's activities and other conference attendees. To ensure that all conference registrants can listen to webinars that they may have missed earlier in the week, the webinars will be recorded and available to registrants for review by May 17th. There will also be some virtual workshops for registrants to attend on May 17th that may each run for up to two hours. On May 18th, along with keynote presentations, the session leaders from each of the webinars will be arranged into panels--each focusing on one of the conference themes--and conference registrants can engage in question-and-answer sessions with each panel.

There will also be a virtual "poster" session as a part of this conference. A week before the conference, individuals who share posters will record short webinars that describe their work (up to 5 minutes in length) with no more than 10 slides within the webinar. Once all posters are recorded in this way, they will be placed in an area where conference registrants can view them and ask questions or make comments throughout the week. Poster presenters will be encouraged to check back throughout the week and respond to any questions/comments about their work.

Just as break-out sessions at USCOTS involve much activity and discussion, it is hoped the webinars through eCOTS will also be opportunities for audience engagement. eCOTS themes are:

1. Teaching Statistics: Debating some of the Big Ideas
   This theme will consist of a series of sessions--each with at least two presenters--where different "big ideas" about teaching statistics are debated.
2. Statistics for the Modern Student
   This theme will consist of a series of sessions about ways to motivate and engage our modern students who have grown up embedded in the digital age of big data, social media, and international connectivity.
3. Commercial resources for Teaching Statistics
   This theme will consist of webinars by eCOTS sponsors on their current products and resources for teaching college level statistics

eCOTS organizing Committee: Michelle Everson (Chair), University of Minnesota; Ellen Gundlach, Purdue University; Megan Mocko, University of Florida; Georgette Nicolaides, Syracuse University; Dennis Pearl, Ohio State University; and Michael Posner, Villanova University