LibreText
traces its roots to Delmar Larsen’s frustration that his students had each
shelled out $200 for a chemistry textbook that he discovered was riddled with
errors. Larsen, an associate professor at the University of California, Davis,
didn’t have the funds to assemble a textbook of his own, but what he did have was
a valuable creative resource in those students.
Ten
years later, the project that began in that class has grown into an extensive
library of open course resources, accessible through a Creative Commons license, with much of the content created via crowdsourcing
by students, instructors, and topic experts. A dozen subjects are covered,
including math, statistics, biology, physics, medicine, and the humanities.
Students participate via class assignments to address a specific question or
mirror a chapter’s worth of content from an existing resource. Afterward, some
continue to contribute as volunteers or paid content developers.
Like
a wiki, there is no formal peer-review process for LibreText resources,
although certain account-holders can correct errors instantly and anyone else
can highlight mistakes through feedback. Larsen noted to EdSurge that even with
peer review, traditional textbooks can be full of errors. In print, those
persist until the next edition, while most mistakes in the LibreText library
can be corrected within a half-hour of being pointed out.
“No
textbook or resource is going to be 100% accurate, ever,” an executive of
OpenStax, the open course materials provider based at Rice University, told
EdSurge. The closest to perfect is content that can be fixed immediately.
In
2014, Larsen conducted an experiment by teaching two chemistry classes, one
with a conventional textbook and one with LibreText. At the end of term, the
open resource was judged in no way inferior to the traditional content.
