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OpenStax – openly licensed textbooks

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Re: OpenStax – openly licensed textbooks

#41

Post by therealmarv »

logfromblammo wrote: post #35
tssva wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From their support site. "Do you have .epub versions of your books? We no longer support .epub versions of our OpenStax books. Only a small percentage (around 1 percent) of OpenStax readers reported using the .epub format, and maintaing these versions is costly; instead, we focus on providing our online web view, PDF, iBooks, Amazon, and print versions. You can see what formats are available for your subject at OpenS…

> maintaing these versions is costly I call bullshit. EPUB is basically a self-contained web site with a built-in index. If the text is maintained as an EPUB to begin with, producing a PDF is functionally identical to rendering it on an EPUB reader with a fixed page size and font. They provide an online web view. The margin of difference between that and EPUB is building the metadata file and ZIPping it all into a si…

Hahaha, look closely at the PDF and online version (just look at the math). There are a ton of corner cases which EPUB and especially the EPUB readers do not support. It's definitely not convert into EPUB once and then make books out of it with shell scripts. This is a very wishful thinking of the EPUB standard (which is not a bad standard but it's not that overall solution you are stating here).

Re: OpenStax – openly licensed textbooks

#42

Post by notafraudster »

The content here seems fairly good, but from opening a random sample of textbooks, I notice pretty consistently poor presentation and formatting. Almost everything is presented in a wall of single column text with long paragraphs, a small font, and limited in-set visualization. This was especially bad in Intro Sociology and Intro to U.S. Government from what I checked.

I found some pagination / page break issues (e.g. page 379 in Intro Statistics is empty and the transition from 381 to 382 also has a weird orphan problem). The same section also has section numbering problems. Edit: Reading more, I see a ton of equations that aren't rendered very well (page 405 in intro stats, look at all of the \bar{x} in the first half -- is this even using LaTeX to render or is this like a bad Microsoft Word equation editor thing?)

In the statistics world, OpenIntro Statistics -- https://www.openintro.org/stat/ -- seems quite a lot better as a textbook

Re: OpenStax – openly licensed textbooks

#43

Post by nickpsecurity »

heydenberk wrote: post #12

I've often thought that textbooks would be a productive place to focus excess energy among software freedom types. The way I see it, there are at least three ways in which most technology professionals could effectively contribute: - Content production and editing - Improving the design and branding of open textbook purveyors - Advocating for the adoption of open source textbooks in your local K-12 system and communi…

I often suggest Wikimedia use their excess money not spent on Wikipedia itself to create low-cost or openly-licensed textbooks. If adopted by schools, students everywhere would save money on textbooks that were high quality. The collection would grow over time as both revenue and donations come in. They might also do something similar to Coursera. Textbooks just seemed like they'd be easier project with large, positive outcome. Plus, some could be updated rarely (eg 5 years) since the content doesn't change much.

Re: OpenStax – openly licensed textbooks

#44

Post by wilsonfiifi »

philschatz wrote: post #40

If you would like to help, the code is open source at https://github.com/openstax and https://github.com/connexions ... Also, OpenStax is hiring! https://jobs.rice.edu/postings/14338 (Disclaimer: I currently work at OpenStax, but am not speaking on behalf of OpenStax)

OpenStax CMS[0] is built with Wagtail[1] (Django based CMS framework). This is a good example (live) project to sink my teeth into and learn more about Wagtail. Incidentally does anyone know of any good resources (books, tutorials) to go from beginner to advanced Wagtail developer?

  [0] https://github.com/openstax/openstax-cms
  [1] https://wagtail.io/

Re: OpenStax – openly licensed textbooks

#45

Post by detaro »

logfromblammo wrote: post #35
tssva wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From their support site. "Do you have .epub versions of your books? We no longer support .epub versions of our OpenStax books. Only a small percentage (around 1 percent) of OpenStax readers reported using the .epub format, and maintaing these versions is costly; instead, we focus on providing our online web view, PDF, iBooks, Amazon, and print versions. You can see what formats are available for your subject at OpenS…

> maintaing these versions is costly I call bullshit. EPUB is basically a self-contained web site with a built-in index. If the text is maintained as an EPUB to begin with, producing a PDF is functionally identical to rendering it on an EPUB reader with a fixed page size and font. They provide an online web view. The margin of difference between that and EPUB is building the metadata file and ZIPping it all into a si…

> The real reason is that a lot of the available EPUB readers do not render web pages consistently, and they don't want to test Adobe Digital Editions, Calibre, etc.

because that's necessary to maintain an acceptable epub offering, and is costly?

Re: OpenStax – openly licensed textbooks

#46

Post by skh »

RankingMember wrote: post #33
skh wrote: post #19

I teach mathematics at a community college and use free materials in my courses or use materials that I’ve created. I never use paid materials in my courses. The reason I can do this is because math doesn’t change from year to year. I’m in a subject whose content is static. Even so most open textbooks are quite bad. I’ve only found a few that were really good. Writing a good book even in a field whose content doesn’t…

I wish more teachers of subjects like this had your mindset. I wonder if other colleges have some sort of requirement that the teacher push the book.

Every college/university I've taught at allows instructors to choose their own book or has a committee of faculty members in the department choose the book. Increasingly there is a movement in state legislatures that mandate that the university system push open source textbooks. There's definitely a desire amongst a lot of faculty to use an open text book but the book has to be good and that's the hard part.

One thing to keep in mind is that publishers don't publish books to appeal to students. Their client are faculty members. So they include things like websites that handle grading online homework/quizzes. Faculty are going to use what makes their job easier. With pay not commensurate with level of education I understand why faculty have this mindset. Personally I think it's bad to use the online homework/quizzing systems out there.

Re: OpenStax – openly licensed textbooks

#47

Post by skh »

krn wrote: post #38
HarryHirsch wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP is talking about teaching community college mathematics. That's not introductory university mathematics; if you are lucky it's Pythagoras' Theorem and quadratic equations. The purpose of community college is to provide the students with a degree certificate that they can use for another degree. My current institution's nursing school has a set text called "Calculate with Confidence", which teaches the kids to…

> The OP is talking about teaching community college mathematics. That's not introductory university mathematics; if you are lucky it's Pythagoras' Theorem and quadratic equations. W. W. Sawyer's books, such as Mathematician's Delight[1] and Vision in Elementary Mathematics[2], seem to be exactly for this audience. [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0486462404/ [2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/048642555X/

I looked at the books. They seem really nice but are not feasible for use in the classroom for the courses that we teach.

Re: OpenStax – openly licensed textbooks

#48

Post by logfromblammo »

detaro wrote: post #45
logfromblammo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maintaing these versions is costly I call bullshit. EPUB is basically a self-contained web site with a built-in index. If the text is maintained as an EPUB to begin with, producing a PDF is functionally identical to rendering it on an EPUB reader with a fixed page size and font. They provide an online web view. The margin of difference between that and EPUB is building the metadata file and ZIPping it all into a si…

> The real reason is that a lot of the available EPUB readers do not render web pages consistently, and they don't want to test Adobe Digital Editions, Calibre, etc. because that's necessary to maintain an acceptable epub offering, and is costly?

No more costly than testing the web version on Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Opera.

They already use iBooks and Kindle. So they already decided to pay that cost for two specific ebook readers.

Re: OpenStax – openly licensed textbooks

#50

Post by waterhouse »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #43
heydenberk wrote: post #12

I've often thought that textbooks would be a productive place to focus excess energy among software freedom types. The way I see it, there are at least three ways in which most technology professionals could effectively contribute: - Content production and editing - Improving the design and branding of open textbook purveyors - Advocating for the adoption of open source textbooks in your local K-12 system and communi…

I often suggest Wikimedia use their excess money not spent on Wikipedia itself to create low-cost or openly-licensed textbooks. If adopted by schools, students everywhere would save money on textbooks that were high quality. The collection would grow over time as both revenue and donations come in. They might also do something similar to Coursera. Textbooks just seemed like they'd be easier project with large, positi…

There is something called Wikibooks, though I've only spent maybe half an hour reading a particular wikibook years ago and can't speak to overall quality:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

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