Good afternoon everyone,
Dr. Larsen has provided a title and description for the webinar along with the link that
you can use should you wish to attend (there is no need to register):
Webinar Title: Using the LibreTexts to Create, Curate and Disseminate your Course
Textbooks
Webinar description: It is becoming ever clearer that new and innovative educational
efforts are required to facilitate the greater creativity, flexibility, and increased
learning capability needed for post-secondary education in the future. Unfortunately,
rapidly rising undergraduate fees and textbook costs are serious factors that impede
access to higher education for many students; many of which do not have the funds to
benefit from these new advances that are often commercialized. Growing textbook costs are
a serious barrier for under-served, at-risk students and open-educational resources (OER)
textbooks are a growing approach to address these issues. The Libretexts project
(
http://LibreTexts.org) is a collaborative OER platform designed to simultaneously enable
the dissemination and evaluation of existing resources and as a dynamic “courseware” to
facilitate new education developments and approaches, with an emphasis on data-driven
assessment of student learning and performance. Since its inception 12 years ago, the
Libretexts has been exponentially growing and currently reaches over 60 million students
per year and is the most visited online OER textbook site in the world today.
Webinar link:
https://zoom.us/j/820359852
Thank you,
Rajiv
From: Rajiv Jhangiani <rajiv.jhangiani(a)kpu.ca>
Date: Friday, May 31, 2019 at 10:47 AM
To: KPU Open Education listserv <openkpu(a)mail.bccampus.ca>
Subject: Libretexts webinar on Tuesday, June 11 at 10am
Dear colleagues,
Libretexts<https://libretexts.org/index.html> is a wiki-based alternative to open
textbooks. Founded by Dr. Delmar Larsen, Associate Professor of Chemistry at the
University of California at Davis, this non-profit project originated in Chemistry (when
it was called ChemWiki) but has since grown (with the help of US federal funding) to
encompass a variety of STEM, Social Science, and other disciplines. Libretexts is a
hyperlibrary that has imported all of the available open textbooks (including the OpenStax
open textbooks currently used in Math and Physics). Unlike Wikipedia, not anyone can edit
Libretexts (there is faculty oversight), which is why institutions such as the U of
Michigan, U of Kansas, California State U and others use Libretextsas a customized open
textbook for many of their Science courses.
Beyond text, Libretexts embeds multimedia (e.g., video), dynamic figures, Jupyter
notebooks, Hypothes.is<http://Hypothes.is> annotations, and supports print on
demand. (See:
https://libretexts.org/advanced.html). Instructors who use Libretexts for
their required course readings can also avail of learning analytics that can shed insight
a range of interesting behaviours, such as the percentage of your students who have
accessed the required readings for the first time only 24 hours prior to the exam (i.e.
cramming).
Delmar has kindly offered to provide a webinar for our faculty who are interested in
learning more about this approach to OER (note that there is no fee associated with using
Libretexts for either students or KPU). The webinar is scheduled for Tuesday June 11 at
10-11am. For those unable to make that time, the webinar will be recorded and made
available online.
If you are interested in attending this webinar please let me know by replying to this
email.
Thank you,
Rajiv
[logo gif]
Rajiv Jhangiani, Ph.D.
Associate Vice Provost, Open Education
Kwantlen Polytechnic University
t 604.599.3253 e rajiv.jhangiani@kpu.ca<mailto:rajiv.jhangiani@kpu.ca>
www.kpu.ca/open<http://www.kpu.ca/open>
This e-mail and any attachments may be confidential or legally privileged. If you received
this message in error or are not the intended recipient, please destroy the e-mail message
and any attachments or copies.
At KPU, we work, study, and live in a region south of the Fraser River which overlaps with
the unceded traditional and ancestral lands of the Kwantlen, Musqueam, Katzie, Semihamoo,
Tsawwassen, Qayqayt, and Kwikwetlen peoples.