OpenStax College

College Physics         University Physics[1]         Astronomy         How Things Work

In the past, OpenStax College has hosted practice quizzes through Learningpod.[2] Unfortunately, the future of this support is uncertain[3]. Wikiversity should fill the gap by hosting quizzes for OpenStax textbooks.

About OpenStax College

OpenStax College is an open textbook initiative at Rice University that began in 2012. It provides peer-reviewed college-level textbooks that are available in both printed and digital formats. As of 2015, seventeen textbooks have been produced[4], and more are under construction.[5] The closely affiliated OpenStax CNX contains learning objects, called pages, that are organized into textbook-style books in a host of disciplines. All these items are accessible online and downloadable to almost any device.[6] A number of these options are free of charge, although donations are always welcome.

License

OpenStax operates under a under a CC-BY-A license that permits two-way transfer of materials between OpenStax and Wikipedia, Wikiversity, and other sisters. The category Commons:Category:CNX lists uploaded 601 images (as of 4/24/2015).

Sometimes less is more

Sometimes more is more. The most efficient rig has only two sails, a main for power and a jib for trim. More sails mean less speed but more fun.

This proposal is to establish an open source quizbank that will initially differ sharply from the testbanks commonly distributed with commercial textbooks. Commercial testbanks are huge, and designed to be edited by the user. The software required to manage a "large" opensource data base would take more resources than appear to be available at the moment. Although it is out of necessity that Wikiversity can only offer small and uneditable quizbanks, there are advantages to being "small": The instructor knows exactly what the students are studying, and the students know exactly what to study. And, the instructor will not be asked to spend valuable time learning how to manage the testbank or choosing which questions should be put on tests.

A "small" product can exist as a self-contained component that represents only a portion of the course and grade assessment. This frees the instructor's time to focus on higher level learning. The inflexibility in adjusting Wikiversity testbanks forces Wikiversity to play a larger role in course management than would otherwise be the case. Fortunately, with the help of posted solutions and explanations, the mastery of this material can be done entirely online, with little or no coaching from the instructor.

The dream of an open source testbank

Student debt has recently surpassed credit card debt in the USA.[7][8] An open source quizbank on Wikiversity might help reduce the cost of higher education, especially in the first two years of college. Instructors and textbook publishers are playing an expensive cat-and-mouse game with students regarding homework problems and exams. It requires a great deal of time and money to be constantly inventing new exam and homework problems that become obsolete as the "secrets" become common knowledge.

Virtually all the knowledge associated with most college major degrees is available on the internet, and in many cases on Wikipedia itself. If Googgle can drive a car it should be possible to produce software that can perform much of the routine testing of student competence. The associated reduction in the cost of higher education could be dramatic. Or, perhaps society will choose instead to use the savings to increase the quality of a college education by focusing on aspects of education not found in the traditional textbooks and test banks. Either way, the reform can begin with an open source method by which students can demonstrate expertise in certain mechanical aspects of the college degree.


Coordination with Quizbank

Quizbank hosts "live" (editable) links for development

Those involved in the construction of an open source quizbank will tend to uses these subpages of Quizbank:

College Physics I&II         Calculus Physics I&II[9]         Astronomy         How things work         List of quizzes

PDF printable files for classrooms

Students and instructors seeking a secure[10] CMS environment may post a permalink of one of these OpenStax College pages:

College Physics         University Physics[11]         Astronomy         How Things Work

Making the testbank user friendly

The resource will not be a "testbank" (or "quizbank"[12]), but be "collection" of complete and ready-to-use quizzes and exams that require a bit of effort to change or edit.[13]

Pagebreaks in the Wikiversity resource are achieved using the commands ''<div style="page-break-before:always"></div>'' and ''{{pagebreak}}''[14]

Technical details

The actual quiz will reside in the author's computer, where it interacts with a high-level programming language[15] that produces wikitext (such as in this MATLAB code). Two types of resources are uploaded onto Wikiversity:

  1. The primary resource is a quiz extension similar to this example. Wikiversity readers can practice this quiz online as often as they wish, and no record is kept of their efforts.
  2. A subpage to the primary resource resembles this tesbank except that it will not be a quiz extension, but an ordinary Wikiversity regular page[16], except that (unseen) page breaks will permit it to be downloaded as a PDF that can be printed for use in the classroom.[17] It is likely that a variety of these "collections" will be needed: quizzes, midterms, and a final. The wikitext for all these versions will be written by the high-level programming language.

Ideas that don't seem to work

  1. It is almost useless to publish a large collection of Wikiversity quizzes, each formatted as a Mediawikiwiki:Extension:Quiz [18] due to page break problem.
  2. There does not seem to be an existing CMS (LMS) assessement-making system[19]. Physics quizzes require figures, formulas, and on occasion, complicated calculations. If an appropriate system exists, we cannot find it.

How you can contribute

We need ideas. Leave a comment at this discussion.

Links, Footnotes, and References

Links about Quizzes

  1. http://docs.moodle.org/24/en/MathType#Example:_Add_equations_to_Moodle_assessments
  2. http://docs.moodle.org/27/en/Question_types#Calculated_multi-choice
  3. http://docs.moodle.org/28/en/Moodle_XML_format
  4. http://docs.moodle.org/28/en/Word_table_format (XML format only)

Other links

openStax College Physics

Footnotes and references

  1. ↑ Calculus based Physics is also called University Physics., and College Physics is the name usually given for algebra or trigonometry based versions of a essentially the same course.
  2. ↑ http://www.learningpod.com/workbook/openstax-anatomy-and-physiology/658a9bcc-378e-49c1-81d1-194724efef94
  3. ↑ http://go.learningpod.com/blog/final-message-from-learningpod
  4. ↑ http://openstaxcollege.org/books
  5. ↑ http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=OpenStax_College&oldid=649477521
  6. ↑ http://cnx.org/about
  7. ↑ http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2014/jun/10/mark-warner/warner-says-us-student-debt-has-surpassed-credit-c/
  8. ↑ http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Student_debt&oldid=658255096#United_States
  9. ↑ also known as "University Physics"
  10. ↑ The Course Management System is secure because a permalink to this page is uneditable and because the page contains permalinks to pdf files. To ensure that it is the right version of the page, students must obtain the correct URL from the instructor.
  11. ↑ (i.e., Calculus based Physics)
  12. ↑ To facilitate Google search engines, the should be called "quiz banks" or "assessment banks" because "testbank" has a different meaning in software development.
  13. ↑ Editing is accomplished by printing the Wikiversity page or associated PDF printout and pasting the result into a blank word processing document.
  14. ↑ http://jimbojw.com/wiki/index.php?From http://jimbojw.com/wiki/index.php?title=Forcing_page_breaks_in_Wiki_Articlestitle=Forcing_page_breaks_in_Wiki_Articles
  15. ↑ The wikitext is currently written by MATLAB, but Python might be a better choice.
  16. ↑ It might save a bit of space and facilitate coding if this secondary quiz collection used transclusions from the primary resource
  17. ↑ Users who do not wish to print the entire "collection" of exams may scroll down the long pdf file and randomly select only those pages that need to be printed.
  18. ↑ also written as "mw:Extension:Quiz' or called "quiz extension"
  19. ↑ When googling, use "assessment" and/or "quiz" banks and systems; "testbank" has other meanings.

Subpages If this link fails, use Special:PrefixIndex/OpenStax_College

This article is issued from Wikiversity - version of the Friday, December 04, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.