1.1: Project Overview
LibreTexts is a collaborative effort to improve education for students, especially economically-disadvantaged students, by constructing and distributing open-access online LibreTexts libraries. The project includes complementary ancillaries that advance a number of different pedagogical methods. It supports a highly diverse student population previously exposed to a broad range of learning experiences and with major differences in their skill levels, preparation, and background. In addition to providing up-to-date, peer-reviewed, affordable, and convenient content. LibreTexts, as a Next-generation learning system, promotes personalized, flexible, and interactive learning experiences. From these components, we will have a combined assessment infrastructure that tracks and correlates individual performance with simulations, homework activities, and exam performance with a goal of identifying and tracking student strengths and weakness to determine how best to amplify learning across multiple curricula. This is enabled by broad scope vertical and horizontal nature of the LibreTexts.
The success of the LibreTexts Project positively impacts four main populations in substantial ways: (1) Availability of free quality resources for learning by the non-academic community; (2) Reducing the financial burden on all students, especially lower socioeconomic status students, while simultaneously addressing any identified lack of preparation; (3) Smaller or financially disadvantaged academic institutions, including high schools, that increasingly wish to adopt newer learning technologies but cannot afford the initial buy-in to change curriculum; and (4) Discipline-based education researchers looking for a platform to evaluate interdisciplinary approaches and curriculum modifications that would otherwise cost too much to develop from scratch. For broader impacts, we propose will take advantage of the LibreTexts extensive dissemination network to provide equal education opportunities to students with limited English proficiency by expanding the libraries into Spanish language translations.
Traditional publishing of a textbook involves preparing a typeset manuscript for a commercial publisher, who binds it and distributes it, often at prices that make it inaccessible to students from less affluent institutions. However, online texts are superior to a paper text in several ways:
- Web browsers can jump to the page you click on, so even an 800 page book can be read in real time.
- The equations, sections, references and index cross-referencing can be hyperlinked, so students can effortlessly jump back and forth through the text.
- Traditionally, there are conflicts between conciseness (i.e., important ideas get across within reasonable reading time) and scholarly completeness. Online texts allow for branching into levels of detail suited to individual reader's interests, and providing up-to-date links to other relevant material.
- It is often more instructive to work through a solution of a problem than be given only the abstract theory. Online texts helps by providing links to student projects and problem solutions.
It is possible to have LibreTexts books printed by print-on-demand companies (both Amazon and LuluExpress output files are generated). A complete book takes often years to produce; however, the LibreTexts platform makes it possible to make accessible the (semi)completed parts as textbook construction proceeds. The LibreTexts project adopts an open construction approach since we strongly believe that is better to have educational content accessible to students and then continuously improve it, rather than refusing to share until the building and perfecting is completed.
Content on LibreTexts is either constructed from scratch or harvested from existing OER content, but most of it is integrated from existing content scattered across the internet. Content stored on individual faculty's websites, hidden in pdfs, or published has been integrated into the LibreTexts format, all with the original author's permission to publish the content under a free license that aligns with the free and accessible philosophy of the LibreTexts. Central to its success is the construction and adoption of faculty specific and freely accessible "LibreTexts" that substitute for costly conventional textbooks in post-secondary courses. These are assembled by incorporating content from an extensive network of existing chemistry and broader materials. We recently hosted a YouTube webinar to explain our project and scope:
Video \(\PageIndex{1}\): www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxLmeHMgvTg
The Construction guide aids developers in interacting with the LibreTexts platform and building content. To complement these resources, there is a Construction Forum for developers to help each other, which is freely available (however, a free account is needed to post) ( groups.io/g/Libretexts-ConstructionForum/topics ):
LibreVerse
The LibreTexts Libraries are part of a great "LibreVerse" of interconnected technologies to advance the development and usage of the textbook of the future. Many aspects of this greater LibreVerse will be introduced in this Construction Guide.
Supporting the libraries are a number of components (most require instructor accounts to access and are unlinked below)
- ADAPT – LibreTexts’ new homework system with integrated problem sets.
- Analytics - Linked to the Adapt homework system, LibreTexts’ Analytics have been designed by instructors for their students.
- Studio – LibreTexts’ H5P app for building questions that can be inserted into your LibreTexts.
- Nova - Drupal based FOSS tech allows local hosting of LibreTexts’ with native H5P, QTI and other courseware features.
- Commons – LibreTexts’ window on the world, access to Catalog, Libraries and Collections. Every LibreNet member has their own branded Campus Commons.
- Conductor – LibreTexts’ team oriented project management software coordinates book construction and curation.
- Composer – LibreTexts’ drag and drop remixer for books. LibreTexts’ editor provides paragraph level attribution, automatic numbering of equations and more.
- Curator – LibreTexts’ format allows centralized, automatic curation flagging common problems including lack of alt text, linkrot and more.
- Jupyter Hubs - provides an environment where you can create interactive notebooks with code, visualizations, and more.
- Support Center - Contact the LibreTexts Support Team for help, and explore featured insight articles and videos curated by the LibreTexts team.