Study Focuses on Student Highlighting

Nonprofit textbook publisher OpenStax is participating in a study of student highlighting habits. It’s working with researchers from Rice University, the University of Colorado-Boulder, and the University of California, San Diego, on software that uses highlighting to help improve student comprehension and knowledge retention.

The $1 million research program, funded by one of 18 grants awarded by the National Science Foundation, will ask OpenStax users to volunteer content they highlight to a database to be mined for clues about their understanding of the text. Researchers also plan laboratory tests at Rice, UC-Boulder, and UCSD to create software to leverage the information gathered from the volunteered highlights.

“A number of studies have shown that highlighting does little to improve learning outcomes, but students tend to think that it does, and it makes them feel good about studying,” Philip Grimaldi, a research scientist for OpenStax, said in an article for phys.org. “At the same times, college students generally aren’t willing to change how they study, so we want to piggyback on what they’re already doing—spontaneously annotating passages of text—and turn that from a marginal activity into one that improves learning.”

The goal is to develop software that predicts how well students perform on tests based on what they highlight in their textbooks. From that information, researchers want to build a tool that creates more effective quizzes and reviews, and determines the times that are best to present content so students get the most out of the material.

“The idea is to reformulate selected passages into review questions that encourage the active reconstruction and elaboration of knowledge,” said Richard Baraniuk, founder and director of OpenStax. “The design and implementation of the tool will be informed by both randomized controlled studies within the innovative OpenStax textbook platform and in coordinated laboratory studies.”

NACSCORP, OpenStax Launch ACCES

NACSCORP, a subsidiary of the National Association of College Stores, and the Rice University-based publisher OpenStax has expanded their partnership by launching the Affordable Custom Content Enhancement System (ACCES) on the eve of CAMEX 2016 in Houston, TX. The online platform allows faculty to create open educational resources (OER) and offer them through their campus store.

OpenStax has released 16 college titles that are used by nearly 400,000 students this year. The number of instructors using OpenStax titles increased by more than 100% in 2015 because of its partnership with NACSCORP, which provides low-cost print versions of the textbooks.

With ACCES, faculty will be able to reorganize chapters and add their own content. In addition, educational publisher Dover Publications is making its catalog of anthologies of classic literature, poetry, plays, music scores, and other publications available for faculty to insert into ACCES content.

"The OpenStax-NACSCORP custom print partnership is a direct response to faculty requests for customized print versions of OpenStax textbooks that will provide students with useful and affordable course materials," David Harris, editor-in-chief of OpenStax, said in a press release. "Many faculty want to use technology to tailor materials for their students, but they don't want to sacrifice quality. They want to start with a rock-solid, peer-reviewed textbook--preferably one with full-color illustrations and a full suite of homework and testing modules--and they want to make only the changes that are relevant to their teaching."

To make it easier for faculty to track the cost of the books they are working on, ACCES will display associated print costs in real time. ACCES will also automatically format pages and create a new index.

"We are committed to providing our campus store partners with the textbooks their faculty demand, including OER titles and customized materials," said Kurt Schoen, president and chief operating officer of NACSCORP.

CSU Libraries Launch OpenStax Initiative

California State University libraries are working with OpenStax College to provide free and low-cost digital and print textbooks to students on 13 CSU campuses across the state. The initiative is the largest coordinated library showcase of open educational resources (OER) in the nation.

The initiative includes rotating displays, copies of published books, and information on digital offerings and supplemental materials. The effort gives faculty the opportunity to review and evaluate the resources.

The OER content is professionally produced, peer-reviewed, and developed to meet the requirements of introductory college courses. Instructional resources are also available, along with PowerPoint slides and test banks for faculty.

“It is clear that we must take every effort to lower the cost of education for students,” Gary Michelson, who contributed more than $1.3 million to OpenStax College through his 20MM foundation, said in a release. “One area that is often overlooked is the skyrocketing cost of textbooks, which are an underreported financial burden on students. This program will help grow awareness of open textbooks and more affordable education options across a wide swath of the CSU system.”

OpenStax Personalizing College Content

In August, OpenStax received a $9 million grant to develop personalized interactive textbooks for advance-placement biology and high school physics. Now, the nonprofit publisher based at Rice University is turning its attention to personalized courseware for college students as part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Next Generation Courseware Challenge.

OpenStax will use its portion of the $20 million Challenge fund to work on personalized learning technology that can deliver tailored lessons to help students learn at their own pace. It plans to use the new technology in some upcoming textbooks. The goal of the Challenge is to develop personalized digital courseware that will help low-income and disadvantaged student succeed in their college courses.

OpenStax was one of seven finalists named by the Gates Foundation at the Educause 2014 conference.  The other finalists are Acrobatiq, Cerego, CogBooks, Lumen Learning, Smart Sparrow, and the Open Learning Initiative at Stanford University.

“Students learn best when education is personalized to their needs and goals,” said Daniel Greenstein, director of postsecondary success at the foundation. “There is a growing body of evidence that courseware, when integrated effectively by faculty in instruction, can personalize learning at unprecedented scale, potentially enabling all students—not just those who are able to attend the most elite, expensive colleges—to get the best and most effective education at a reasonable price.”

OpenStax Working on Personalized Textbooks

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.

NACSCORP, OpenStax Announce Partnership

OpenStax College open-source titles will be available to more than 3,000 college stores through its new distribution partnership with NACSCORP, a subsidiary of NACS. The agreement provides stores with low-cost printed versions of free digital textbooks produced by the nonprofit publisher based at Rice University.

“As a trade association, NACS is committed to the mission of making sure course materials and all aspects of a higher education are more affordable to students,” NACS CEO Brian Cartier said. “I’m proud to say that this new partnership between NACSCORP and OpenStax College fully supports that mission.”

Printed versions of the OpenStax College textbooks costs about $30-$54, but the agreement will allow those prices to drop by around 2% by next year. Students will also save through reduced shipping costs that are part of the deal.

“NACSCORP distributes to the vast majority of college campuses across the country and many more outside the U.S., and they are committed to making a college education accessible to as many students as possible,” said Daniel Williamson, managing director of OpenStax College. “This deal will make it possible for us to expand our reach but also to lower the prices on our print books at the same time.”

OpenStax College has already published seven textbooks that have been downloaded more than 500,000 times. Its seventh title, Principles of Economics, is the first aimed at courses that normally enroll more than a million U.S. students each year. The publsiher plans to release titles in precalculus, psychology and U.S. history later this year.

“All our books are free online, but many students prefer a printed copy, and thanks to our partnership with NACS, we plan to do something next year that no major publisher has done for a generation: reduce the price of every print title in our catalog,” said Richard Baraniuk, founder of OpenStax College and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice.