Wright State University Lake Campus/Showcase/About

by Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs)

edits welcome

Parallel efforts

I am not working alone. My own efforts (Quizbank, wright.miraheze.org, Physics equations, and How things work college course are still works in progress. The following efforts are much better developed:

• OpenStax College is a well developed effort by Rice University to provide students with textbooks at zero cost. The license is CC-BY.
• chem.libretexts.org (Chemwiki) is another highly developed project designed to provide students with free textbooks and other teaching materials.
• Core Focus on Math is a collection of math quizzes at the pre-college level.
• Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) allows instructors to grade students on both the quality of their essays, as well as their ability to accurately (and anonymously) peer review these essays. This concept has revolutionary potential. In the near future, the use of CPR with live human beings, combined with sophisticated artificial intelligence programs, could reduce the cost of many college degrees to near zero. If computers can drive cars through city traffic, it should be no trouble to develop college education an nearly zero unit cost to most students. One aspect of education not easily mimicked by computers is the writing of course content and study materials, hence the importance of material licensed under Creative Commons.

CPR is available in two forms: The original form is available at zero cost, but require some knowledge of HTML. For a fee, a university can purchase this version with an online editor and other convenient features.

Other commercial efforts

• Quizlet is a collection of quiz questions (see quizlet.com/subject/Astronomy/)

• Chegg Is one of many commercial online textbook rental organizations that provides much more than the textbook, including on-line turtoring and sample exam questions (see this example).

A reason to favor Creative Commons over commercial efforts

It is normal and healthy for the Creative Commons and commercial efforts to operate in parallel, competing to some extent. The advantage of using wikitext to write material protected under a Creative Commons license is that it offers students the opportunity to build reputations as scholars well before graduation from college. The plan is for students to write their materials on private wiki leading out the node at wright.miraheze.org, and use Showcase or other pages on Wikipedia/Wikibooks/Wikiversity to highlight the works, and using permalinks to document the students' authorship.