The Libretexts is designed as a collaborative platform that enables dissemination and evaluation of new education developments and approaches, with an emphasis on data-driven assessment of student learning and performance. The success of the Libretexts project relies on the construction of a large collaborative team extending across multiple campuses to reach students at very different levels of education, including community colleges, four year colleges, and research universities. This is represented, in part, by the broad range of institutions directly involved with the project proposal. The focus of this effort is two-fold: (1) to continue the development of the chemistry library and (2) to shift construction efforts toward its sister libraries. Since the chemistry library is the “flagship” library, its success serves as a model that helps in the recruitment of faculty in the development and adoption of other libraries. The impact of the Libretexts has been quantified both in terms of the number of students using the project to supplement their existing commercial textbook and the number of students that use the chemistry library in lieu of conventional textbooks. Since its inception seven years ago, the ChemWiki has been exponentially growing and currently reaches over 6 million students per month and is the most visited chemistry website in the world with traffic extending over both the United State and to every nation of the world. The success of the Libretexts project as envisioned positively impacts four main populations in substantial ways: (1) Availability of free quality resources for learning by the non-science community; (2) Reducing the financial burden on lower socioeconomic status students; (3) Smaller or financially disadvantaged academic institutions that increasingly wish to adopt newer learning technologies, but cannot afford the initial buy-in to change curriculum; and (4) discipline-based education researchers looking for a platform to evaluate interdisciplinary approaches and curriculum modifications that would otherwise absorb too large of a budget to develop from scratch.

Building the beast-developing and assessing effective cyberlearning within the libretexts open access textbook resource

253rd National Meeting (2017)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.