September 2, 2014      5:09 PM
Seeking a path forward for open-source textbooks in Texas
Effort has lagged because of a lack of vision and insufficient infrastructure
Foundations have pumped
millions of dollars into building a university-driven open-source textbooks
library for Texas schools, but much of the effort has lagged due to a lack of
vision and insufficient infrastructure.
Just last month, the John
and Laura Arnold Foundation donated $9 million to Rice University’s
non-profit OpenStax,
an effort touted to bring peer-viewed high quality instructional materials to
Texas students. To date, OpenStax has spent its time
creating college textbooks, which it estimates has saved students $13 million.
Unlike the printed textbook,
the OpenStax digital textbook is personalized to the
individual student, co-opting the concept of personalized instruction through participant
choices, not dissimilar to the search and suggestion engine Google and Amazon now
used to predict buying patterns.
"We can help teachers and administrators by tapping
into metrics that they already collect -- like which kind of homework and test
questions a student tends to get correct or incorrect -- as well as things that
only the book would notice -- like which examples a student clicks on, how long
she stays on a particular illustration or which sections she goes back to
reread,” said Richard Baraniuk, a
Rice engineering professor who founded OpenStax.
By Kimberly Reeves
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