OpenStax: Free and Flexible Textbooks and Resources
openstax.org
openstax.org
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?
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).
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.
It is amazing how much better English textbooks tend to be compared to the textbooks in my country as well.
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).