Driving Broad Adaptation of Open On Line Educational Resources
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Driving Broad Adaptation of Open On Line Educational Resources
Joshua B. Halpern1 and Delmar S. Larsen2 1 Department of Chemistry, Howard University, 525 College Street NW, Washington, DC 20059, U.S.A. 2 Department of Chemistry, University of California Davis, One Shields Avenue Davis, CA 95616, U.S.A.
ABSTRACT The world is full of educational materials created by faculty but there has been insufficient progress in disseminating even the best of these and without broad dissemination there is little penetration of open materials into higher education. Dissemination of open educational materials cannot be limited to textbooks but systems must be created to support students and faculty as are provided by commercial publishers. LibreTexts addresses this across a broad range of science and technology fields with a new reach into social science and liberal arts. LibreTexts design makes it simple for instructors to build their own courseware, either by mapping components created by others or writing their own. LibreTexts is working towards implementing a complete learning management system including testing software, homework systems guided by artificial intelligence, classroom response software and more to provide an open, online educational system suited to the students and faculty of today. INTRODUCTION Discussion about textbook price is anchored to cost which has grown faster than that of pharmaceuticals, to the point that it matches or exceeds pro rated tuition at community colleges or comprehensive public institutions [1]. Yet, cost is a relatively minor issue in the choice of books by instructors but rather ancillary services offered by the publishers dominates [2,3]. Textbooks are marketed and in great part selected based on the services offered to faculty including “traditional” features as publishers representatives, desk copies, solution manuals, test banks and presentation material and more modern apps including online homework systems. Such support is vital for faculty at teaching institutions who teach three or more courses per semester. Moreover, each of these components has a value to students above its ability to lighten the load of the faculty. Thus, any attempt to replace published textbooks with open online educational resources (OOER) must pay careful attention to creating a similar level of support for faculty. The LibreTexts project started in 2008 as the ChemWIKI. Delmar Larsen at the University of California Davis designed a framework to provide high quality on line textbooks for chemistry [4]. The MindTouch software is WIKI-like but organized to provide structured
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content. In the next few years others began to use the ChemWiki and to add content. The project, still under the name ChemWIKI, grew to include other texts in chemistry, physics and biology. A
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