[HN Gopher] Free online textbooks work
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Free online textbooks work
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 62 points
Date : 2022-08-03 16:38 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gatesnotes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gatesnotes.com)
| civilized wrote:
| I believe free online materials can be tremendously valuable,
| but...
|
| > To see how effective these courses can be, look at Big
| History's impact on students' writing skills, and particularly
| how it helps close the gap between high- and low-income students.
| At the beginning and end of the school year, teachers who use the
| course get a measure of how well each of their students is
| writing. According to the OER Project's internal data, on
| average, only 26 percent of the students taking Big History in
| low-income schools start the academic year rated "proficient" or
| better in writing. By the end of the school year, that number has
| jumped to 62 percent--which is roughly on par with Big History
| students at private schools.
|
| Color me skeptical that a history course can magically turn
| students into proficient writers over one school year.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'm not skeptical. The data appears to be there.
| mbrudd wrote:
| So no questions about the quality or provenance of the data?
| Really?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I believe it. History is the process of reading - digesting -
| synthesising - formulating.
|
| That is the "write better" treadmill. Run it long enough (on
| any meaty topic) and you will improve.
| rg111 wrote:
| I agree.
|
| I write a lot nowadays. Proposals, reports, documentation,
| papers.
|
| One might think that scientific writing is entirely different
| from humanities writing. That would not be true.
|
| I had a very good middle school education in humanities, and
| that education comes in handy whenever I write something,
| anything.
|
| Writing has some core characteristics that are everywhere.
| Once you learn them well, they keep paying forever.
| bigyikes wrote:
| As a mid-level engineer, lately I've come to think that
| improving my writing (or more broadly, communication)
| skills is the best way to grow my career.
|
| All of those great ideas you have aren't worth anything if
| you can't communicate them. We try to make technical
| decisions as objectively as possible, but often some amount
| of persuasion is required to align everyone on your
| preferred outcome.
| Taikonerd wrote:
| Yeah, I was wondering about some kind of selection effect...
| not sure if the kids get to pick whether they're taking the
| course or not.
| powersnail wrote:
| I'm not. A course that is heavy on reading and writing can
| transform the writing ability of a student, especially when the
| starting point is relatively low.
|
| I've witnessed this in my friends when we were in college.
| English was not our first language, and we started with roughly
| the same level of writing ability. But the ones in
| philosophy/history/sociology classes quickly outgrew those of
| us in engineering school. I've read some of their assignments,
| and the improvement could be seen on a weekly basis.
|
| Practice matters. Feedback loop matters.
| Didyourestart wrote:
| Another note is that if the material is actually something that
| a student can engage with the work tends to be a lot better
| because people take more pride in it. In high school I tended
| to get lousy grades and struggled to focus, but in college it's
| been easier because I have more flexibility in my topics and
| can choose things that matter more to me.
| osipov wrote:
| thebooktocome wrote:
| I've been thinking about writing an open textbook (on a graduate
| level math topic that comes up frequently in undergrad math
| courses) but haven't quite found a publication route that I like.
| Anyone have any advice on where to publish such a thing, or how
| to go about distributing it?
| jimhefferon wrote:
| Advice about what? Not snarky, genuinely interested. I released
| v 1.0 of an open undergrad text just yesterday so I have some
| ideas anyway.
| harshreality wrote:
| What do you mean publication route? Don't let dithering over
| minor formatting questions block your progress. What formatting
| questions do you have?
|
| Prose shouldn't need a lot of formatting, so you can write it
| in markdown or a simple subset of html. The math, inline or
| standalone/numbered equations, should be in LaTeX of course.
| MathJax can be applied to markdown or html, and it has simple
| delimiters.
|
| If you want to publish it as something other than html or epub,
| you should really look at pandoc, which will let you convert
| markdown or html to LaTeX (or many other formats). The embedded
| math stays embedded, you can make any minor tweaks you want,
| and then send the full LaTeX document through some professional
| publishing pipeline.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Is there an easy way to see the textbooks themselves? I clicked
| around but wasn't able to figure this out.
| lilgreenland wrote:
| It's important that digital textbooks are more than a pdf of the
| pages found in a traditional textbook. You can do so much more
| with an explorable interactive experience.
|
| I shared my attempt at this on Hacker News a few years ago.
|
| https://landgreen.github.io/physics/index.html
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17178031
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Nice work, a great gift to us all. I originally started
| "Designing Sound" as a website full of easily clickable and
| runnable Pd patches. In some ways publication with MIT forced
| me to shoehorn a much richer experience into a standard
| textbook format. To that extent I remain disappointed with how
| "web" technologies turned out for education. In the end I had
| to take down the site in the face of leaching parasites that
| linked to the material in such a way as to saddle me with the
| bandwidth burden while freeloading as "meta educational" sites.
| 15 years later I am resolved to make my next text, after
| "Ethics for Hackers", be a more permanent free resource taking
| account of lessons learned.
| jimhefferon wrote:
| I admire your work. Can I ask how you deal with upkeep? I can't
| possibly keep updating software to deal with new JavaScript
| versions, and fielding reports like, "It fails on xx browser
| running on yy platform" are a real impediment to progress.
| teddyh wrote:
| More like that: https://ciechanow.ski/archives/
| aperrien wrote:
| Are there any open source elementary school textbooks? That seems
| to be a demographic that could use them.
| sputknick wrote:
| I'm a homeschool parent, I used https://openstax.org/ high school
| physics book with my son last year. Really great resource, its
| essentially Newtonian physics for the first 3/4ths, so hasn't
| really changed in 300 years, no need to publish a new textbook
| every year. Also they embed Khan Academy videos, embedded Flash
| based "games", and they have really well done end of chapter
| questions with answer key (need to show proof of homeschooling to
| get them to email you the answer key). Highly recommend it!
| kragen wrote:
| And, unlike the OER project Gates is funding, the resources
| from OpenStax and Khan Academy are under Creative Commons
| licenses that guarantees they'll _stay_ free. The OER resources
| here are "open" only in the sense that, for the time being,
| they don't charge you to access them. Gates carefully avoids
| any mention of licensing throughout his entire article.
|
| So I'm comfortable labeling OER as "openwashing", given the
| current draconian copyright environment.
|
| In addition to OpenStax and Khan Academy, I can recommend MIT
| OCW and, if it's legal in your country, downloading textbooks
| from Library Genesis.
|
| However, surely Gates is correct when he says, "Courses should
| be created by educators and subject-matter experts,
| supplemented with professional development, and regularly
| improved with feedback from the teachers who use them."
| gnicholas wrote:
| There's also LibreTexts, which are designed to be remix-able.
| I think they pull in most/all of the OpenStax content into
| their platform as well as generating their own.
| kragen wrote:
| Thanks! I didn't know about LibreTexts!
|
| It's probably also worth mentioning Project Gutenberg and
| the Internet Archive, although you probably won't find an
| up-to-date textbook for a class in them unless you're
| studying Classical Greek or something. And no lesson plans.
| kragen wrote:
| I should have said "labeling this OER project as
| 'openwashing'", since "OER" is a broader term that is not
| owned by this one organization.
| cinntaile wrote:
| It sounds like you are trying to insinuate that he's pushing
| the OER project to make a profit at a later time. The Gates
| Foundation has funded KhanAcademy in the past.
| jimhefferon wrote:
| Another one that is elementary and high school oriented, and
| CC licenced, is the Utah's Open Textbook Projects,
| https://www.uen.org/oer/.
| kragen wrote:
| It's probably also worth mentioning
| https://hefferon.net/linearalgebra/,
| https://hefferon.net/computation/index.html, and
| https://hefferon.net/proofs/index.html, all by one Jim
| Hefferon.
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