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Does anyone have thoughts to share (good or bad) on either or both of these resources? I will be teaching Gen Chem I and II at Rider University this year and we are adopting these teaching tools. The textbook is available free and therefore represents a significant cost savings for the students (https://openstaxcollege.org/textbooks/chemistry). I have looked through the book and it seems to be pretty solid, but haven't used it for teaching yet. I have previous experience with Burdge (excellent) and Tro (not impressed), but am a little worried about taking the plunge and going "all electronic". Any thoughts from others more experienced with Openstax and/or non-hard copy textbooks would be appreciated. Thanks!
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I am very interested to hear what you think of the Openstax text. I am considering moving to this model next year so I look forward to hearing about your experiences using the openstax coupled with the sapling online homework.
I have used Sapling Online Homework for my general chemistry class (last year). They have very good customer support. I love that you get a "Tech TA" that can help select questions and make assignments for you - really cuts down on the prep time when you just have to look it over and verify it's what you wanted. I provided a detailed syllabus, calendar, and learning objectives for each assignment and the assignments my Tech TA generated were nearly perfect - I just removed a few problems here & there.
Some things could be improved for large enrollment classes. For instance, my TA's could view the question level statistics for the entire 400+ student class, but there was no way to sort/isolate just their students on the statistics page - that could only be done in the gradebook. But, it has been 6 months since I used Sapling so maybe it's improved in that respect by now.
I haven't used OpenStax before, but UC Davis is the birthplace of the ChemWiki and I have referred students to that free electronic resource (http://chemwiki.ucdavis.edu/). There will be a publication coming out soon about a study of ChemWiki vs. Traditional Textbook. The ChemWiki was deemed non-inferior to the Textbook, however we also learned that students weren't spending that much time using either resource (self-reported data) - a different problem that could influence the non-inferiority determination.