Open Educational Resources: Using LibreTexts to Create an OER

What is LibreTexts?

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 promotes personalized, flexible, and interactive learning experiences.

Who Benefits from LibreTexts?

The success of the LibreTexts Project positively impacts four main populations in substantial ways:

• Provides availability of free quality resources for learning by the non-academic community
• Reduces the financial burden on all students, especially lower socioeconomic status students, while simultaneously addressing the availability of course materials on Day 1
• 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
• 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.

How Does LibreTexts Benefit Students?

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. Delays in financial aid payments result in delays in a student acquiring textbooks, and the student falls behind quickly.

Online texts are superior to a paper text in several ways:

• Web browsers link to the page you click on, so even an 800 page book can be read in real time
  • hyper-linking various course materials (equations, definitions, sections, diagrams, references, etc.) students can effortlessly jump back and forth through the text
• Traditionally, there are conflicts between conciseness (i.e., getting important ideas across within reasonable reading time) and scholarly completeness
  • online texts allow for branching into levels of detail suited to the course 
  • provide up-to-date links to other relevant material
• It is often more instructive for a student to work through the solution to a problem rather than read only the abstract theory
  • online texts provide students with direct links to projects and problem solutions 

Where Does LibreTexts Content Come From?

• constructed from scratch
• harvested from existing OER content
• integrated from existing content scattered across the internet
• integrate from content stored on individual faculty's websites, hidden in pdfs, or published
  • with the original author's permission to publish the content under a free license that aligns with the free and accessible philosophy of 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. 

How is LibreTexts Content Organized?

The LibreTexts consists of field-specific libraries, including K-12, (available in English) and a Spanish (Español) library. With the exception of the K-12 and Español libraries, the content is organized in three primary sections: 

• Campus Bookshelves
• Bookshelves 
• Learning Objects

Campus Bookshelves

The content in the Campus Bookshelves is formulated as campus-dependent and faculty-dependent course shells with customized textbook remixes. These textbooks are customized by faculty, often in collaboration with developers on the LibreTexts team and may include content from any other sections of the LibreTexts libraries (both within and outside of the respective library where it resides). Course materials may include much more than a simple textbook; but also items such as an Agenda, homework assignments, worksheets, and the laboratory manual.

Bookshelves

This is where the LibreTexts books are stored. Instructors can either use these texts as constructed or they can use the OER Remixer to modify these materials and create a remix text that is customized for their course. Note the option for ancillary materials.

Textbooks or Books

Some of the texts in the Bookshelves are titled "Book:" and some "Map:". The "books" are original OER textbooks that have been created by LibreTexts, or integrated into the LibreTexts (e.g., texts from OpenStax or the Open Textbook Library referatory). The content in these Books are largely original, although often heavily edited by editors to conform to project standards on presentation and error correction.

Textmaps or Maps

Alternatively, "Maps" are remixes that are constructed and organized around existing commercial textbooks, but using existing OER content with light or heavy filling in of gaps in the library. The principal goal of the TextMaps is to provide an easy-to-adopt alternative to faculty’s existing textbook choices. Faculty that are too invested in commercial texts to switch to a new organization can adopt a Map.

Learning Objects

These secondary sections contain all materials other than books and homework. The content in this section varies from library to library and may include:

• Worksheets: The LibreTexts worksheets are documents with questions or exercises for students to complete and record answers and are intended to help a student become proficient in a particular skill that was taught to them in class.
• Exemplars and Case Studies: Exemplars are subject-specific examples that illustrate specific concepts. Students can choose from a wide variety of “exemplars”—subject-specific examples that illustrate each concept. Exemplars are arranged in “tracks” that run through the entire course. One track contains most of the topics and concepts included in a typical general chemistry course; topics are arranged by headings similar to textbook chapter titles and subheadings similar to textbook chapter sections.
• Visualization: These are interactive web-based tutorials and simulations that take advantage of the computational resources of an online resource. This involves other active feedback simulations, including virtual laboratories, tutorials, and real-time concept tests.
• References: Tables of constants typically found in textbook appendices or reference books are found in this section.
• Laboratories Experiments and Demonstrations: These are traditional experimental write-ups and demonstrations to increase student attention and engagement in class.

Homework Exercises Sections

These secondary sections are where we organize homework exercises and solutions. A "Faculty Only" section may exist that is accessible to faculty only for use in homework and exams. The homework infrastructure is being migrated to a new server (https://adapt.libretexts.org) that will be available soon. A studio for creating H5P questions is also available (https://studio.libretexts.org). 

Intro to the LibreVerse (March 2024)

Intro to LibreVerse: Commons and Conductor (March 2024)

Intro to LibreVerse: Remixing Textbooks (March 2024)