OpenStax: Free and Flexible Textbooks and Resources

by memorable • 4 years ago

97 15 4 years ago

gaetgu• 4 years ago

I’ve just come here to say that while I am sure that these are useful in some way to someone, they are really bad textbooks. I would rather cough up the ~$250 for a calculus textbook than use the OpenStax one. I know that the rest of my class felt this way and if you read the Amazon reviews similar sentiments (see: I want to buy a copy just to burn it) are stated.

acidioxide• 4 years ago

I have different observations. I am a polish high school student and I've been using openstax physics for college for a long time. Maybe the reason is that textbooks in Poland are very poor, but I use openstax in studying to final exams and competitions, and so far, they served me well. Foreign textbooks are so much better.

BossingAround• 4 years ago

Foreign textbooks are so much better

It is amazing how much better English textbooks tend to be compared to the textbooks in my country as well.

SiriusLi• 4 years ago

If you look up the review scores on Amazon, they mostly get 4+ stars. Other interest might be in play. This is a direct challenge to the textbook rent seeking behavior by some professors, e.g. write new edition each year to destroy the second hand market, use digital logins for exercise materials and so on.

wisty• 4 years ago

I've used them. They're pretty comparable to the average textbook. Maybe a few more typos than some 31st edition (which fixes a few typos and swaps the order of a few common homework questions so you can't buy the last edition) but it's ... fine.

There's some textbooks that have more personality. But the OpenStax books are pretty much the same as any other mainstream book (the kind that are assigned to most classes).

Maybe the calculus class was just boring? The textbook is there as a baseline to cover the derivations, example problems, and how to do them. I can think of plenty of reasons why a calculus class is just boring (too hard, too easy, or it's taught in a boring way).

Lutger• 4 years ago

Being this disproportionately negative makes me think you have an interest in keeping the expensive-textbook business model from being disrupted.

bacheaul• 4 years ago

My wife has the Chemistry 2e books for her uni courses. She absolutely raves about them. Yes, compared to her other Chem books, the printing feels a bit cheap, and the typesetting feels like it could use some work, but in terms of content, they seem to hit the mark.

mncharity3• 4 years ago

Has anyone tried creating deliberative infrastructure in support of crafting better OER? For instance, each field's science education research has lists of misconceptions commonly reinforced in textbooks. It could be nice to collect such lists and... not do that.

The quality of science textbooks has been decried by researchers for decades. Even with SER focused on narrowly incremental improvements, on the easily deployable, textbooks often don't reflect it. Incentives are poorly aligned, authorial resources too limited, and scope constraints too severe. Further, attempts at less incremental, more foundational improvements, are very rare (eg, integrated life-sciences curriculums). What support might allow OER to achieve better?

OpenStax "View online"'s nice text search allowed quickly finding such common misconceptions. And OpenStax supports open errata databases. The database of a past version of a textbook could be reached by URL editing. One misconception was pointed out twice, and WONTFIXed "Our reviewers determined the textbook meets scope, sequence, and accuracy requirements as is. No change will be made." Perhaps if the errata database had a discussion mechanism, like github issues, the problem might have been clarified and the new version of the textbook fixed? (Disclaimer: It's a misconception I commonly check for, and one of the two comments might be mine.)

Problems this pervasive are structural. How might OER creation be restructured to work better? Ideally much much better? For instance, support for easily combining patch-sets might allow an ecology of "ok, I fixed/improved this bit", avoiding multi-year gatekeeping delays.

A decade or two back, NSF almost funded a national science education wikipedia... but didn't. Each common misconception might have had pages of literature overview, discussion, remedies. Is there an alternate timeline where science education content has dramatically improved?

hanche• 4 years ago

Sorry, could you (or someone else) tell me what OER and SER mean?

ectopod• 4 years ago

Open Educational Resource. And maybe Sold Educational Resource?

zozbot234• 4 years ago

Has anyone tried creating deliberative infrastructure in support of crafting better OER?

The Wikiversity project could easily host that kind of stuff. It's a bit of a "catchall" partner project to Wikipedia for all kinds of educational content (in a broad sense) other than simple media files (that's what Wikimedia Commons is for) and newly-written textbooks (that's Wikibooks).

ivan_ah• 4 years ago

How might OER creation be restructured to work better? [...] support for easily combining patch-sets [...]

I think bringing in some of the tools and workflows from open source software development could go a long way. Many OER authors already publish their books on github, and use github issues to receive feedback (and sometimes even PRs).

Unfortunately, many of the teachers (and students) are not technically proficient (at least not enough to know about git, github, and PRs) so that is probably the current limiting factor. I've thought a lot about this, and one of my best ideas for a possible solution was to create a simplified-git where the command names match the domain terminology (save, share, publish, suggestedits, etc.). You can see a sketch of that idea here: https://minireference.com/blog/git-for-authors/

I totally agree in general, if there were tools around OER creation and updates, the OER books will be able to improve much faster than any commercial textbook, and with print-on-demand students would be getting the latest edition with all the fixes each year for something like $20-$30 in print, and free eBooks online.

mncharity3• 4 years ago

Hmm, I don't quickly see an "awesome-oer" gh project list... I wonder...

avipars• 4 years ago

Really great books and resources!

OpenStax: Free and Flexible Textbooks and Resources

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