OpenStax was founded to lower the cost of course
materials through peer-reviewed open textbooks made available in print and
digital formats. Now, it is trying to craft individualize textbooks for each
student.
The nonprofit organization based at Rice University has
received a $9 million grant to develop personalized, interactive textbooks for advance-placement Biology and high school physics. The new textbooks will
be housed in the cloud and employ the same sort of algorithms Google and Amazon
use to provide course materials that match the learning pace of individual
students.
“Imagine a digital textbook where because I’m a
different person and learn differently, my book is different than your book,”
said OpenStax founder Richard Baraniuk. “Because I understand things in a
different way from you, the book itself should change.”
Baraniuk envisions textbooks that will provide students
with quizzes that pop up while they work through a topic to gauge their
comprehension. Additional study material would also be available, depending on
how the student does, and teachers could receive automatic email messages to
track students’ progress.
“You know which page a student is on. You also know as
they’re scrolling around where they might be within the page,” Baraniuk said.
“You know when they’ve clicked on different simulations, practice problems,
videos, etc. You have a sense of whether they’re playing those videos through to
the end, going back to review material.”
OpenStax will spend the next two years working on these
new textbooks, which will be viewable from a variety of digital devices and
will go through the same sort of vetting process traditional textbooks go
through to ensure quality.
