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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