Submitted by Kathryn Haas / Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, IN on Mon, 09/09/2019 - 08:24

Have you heard of LibreTexts? It’s a growing Open Educational Resource (OER) platform that hosts OER across the undergraduate curriculum, especially chemistry! The goal of LibreTexts is to decrease the cost of education by replacing expensive textbooks with free, high quality, online materials. As faculty we know, and research confirms, that the high cost of textbooks is hurting our students. Up to two thirds of students do not buy assigned textbooks, and cost is a major factor. Many of those who do buy the assigned text try to reduce costs by purchasing temporary access to a rented copy or selling a book back to the bookstore at the end of the semester. This means that they do not have their Gen. Chem book when they are taking Inorganic, or their Calculus book when they are studying P-Chem.  

What’s even better than just replacing an expensive text? You can customize the materials for your course on LibreTexts. If you are like me, and no “perfect” text exists for your interdisciplinary course, LibreTexts makes it possible for you to combine and edit materials from several OER sources to create the right mix of materials for your course, all in one place! Chemistry faculty at about 90 colleges and universities have already “officially” adopted LibreTexts in their courses, and word of mouth tells us that even more faculty are using LibreTexts “unofficially”. 

LibreTexts is more than a repository: it is a platform for faculty to create custom OER by remixing materials. You can use materials from across the curriculum in your chemistry “course shell”, including sections from statistics, math, and biology textbooks. LibreTexts provides a landing page for your course, but can also be imported into your LMS.  Students or faculty can also print nicely-formatted “books” from LibreTexts using low-cost printing services like Lulu.com ($12/500 pages!). LibreTexts is also developing a homework system which will integrate several low/no cost existing systems like WebWork and MySimpleMath through our Tsugi LMS. 

The chemistry library on LibreTexts is the most fully developed of all the disciplines, but we have a way to go before there are sufficient resources to allow a student to get through their entire chemistry major without having to purchase textbooks. Inorganic chemistry in particular, has gaps in the content. This is a call to the IONiC community to help! 

Here are some important ways you can help:

  • Five Slides About: If you have already created a Five Slides About LO, it could be posted as its own section in the Inorganic LibreTexts Bookshelf. We just need your permission to do it! Alternatively, you could become an editor and upload your own materials!

  • Problems: If you have written practice problems AND it would be ok for solutions to be public, they could be embedded within text sections as practice problems. *Note: LibreText is not yet the best place for problems for which the answers should not be available to students (like exam problems) although all materials can be kept private or open only to designated collaborators.

  • Tell your students: If you can’t adopt LibreTexts for your Inorganic course yet, you can still let your students know that the content from their intro-level courses in math, chemistry, and biology is available on LibreTexts. It can be a great resource for students who no longer have their textbook.

  • Involve your students: Some chemistry faculty have mobilized students to write new content on LibreText in the specific discipline of their course (see Metals in Biological Systems (Saint Mary’s) and the Introduction to Materials Characterization Collaborative Text (F&M). Consider motivating students to learn by assigning them work that will result in LibreTexts articles. My students have thanked me for letting them give back to the source they use for free in class!

If you have questions, or if you are interested in making more extensive contributions to LibreTexts resources, please contact me, Kat Haas (khaas@saintmarys.edu), or anyone else on the Development Team! There is also a “Get Started” google doc here (click) that you can use to dip your toes in the LibreTexts waters on your own! And, keep an eye out for our workshop at the 2020 BCCE meeting!