Collaborative Research: Undergraduate Teaching and Learning in Mathematics With Open Software and Textbooks

这个改进本科STEM教育（IUSE）开发和实施项目旨在解决本科STEM课程中的挑战，特别是促进学生学习和发展数学和计算技能的需求。具体地说，这个项目的重点是开源的数学教科书，这些教科书可以在免费的在线版本中获得。它试图理解两个相互关联的问题：“教师和学生如何使用教科书？”和“我们如何开发更好地支持教与学的教科书？”为了回答这些问题，该项目将完成一项全面的教育研究，包括从不同环境下的多个教室收集数据，并对这些数据进行后续分析。该项目的开发部分将集中在“托普”上，这是一个旨在鼓励创建免费、开源教科书的出版系统。该项目将检查现有的由托词创建的书籍的使用情况，并根据这些观察结果进一步开发托词平台，这样开放源码的教科书可以提高效率。研究和开发活动的整合是为了在研究和开发活动之间创造一个持续的创新循环。该项目的教育研究部分将研究两年制学院和四年制学院和大学教授的49门课程。这些课程包括第一年的微积分，第二年的线性代数和高年级抽象代数。这项研究将调查教师在规划和教授从在线教科书中提取的课程时的工作，以及学生使用同一本教科书学习材料时的工作。此外，该研究还将这些工作与教师和学生在使用不太动态的资源（例如，PDF或同一材料的装订副本）时所做的工作进行对比。托普是一个新的创作平台，使作者能够轻松地为印刷（静态）和在线（动态）格式设计教科书，包括在线版本中的计算和交互组件。该项目将继续开发“借口”和技术基础，以创建高质量的在线教科书版本，同时只要求作者专注于他们的内容。进一步完善残疾人无障碍阅读功能。在线教科书的固有技术结构将允许自动收集学生教科书使用数据，由单个读者组织，分辨率到分钟，并在单个组件的级别，如观看视频。这种研究和开发活动之间的相互作用将产生大量关于学生使用教科书的高质量数据。美国数学协会的开放教科书计划将继续并扩大其在审查和推荐优质免费和低成本教科书方面的领导地位，并帮助其他STEM学科采用其成功的评估标准。针对教师、作者和软件开发人员的研讨会将融合传播、专业发展、编辑审查和软件开发。这些研讨会的一个新颖之处在于，它将教导考试现场的教师如何改进他们在课程中使用的开源教科书。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) Development and Implementation project aims to address challenges in the undergraduate STEM curriculum, particularly the need to promote student learning and the development of mathematical and computational skills. Specifically, this project focuses on open source mathematics textbooks that are available in free online versions. It seeks to understand two interrelated questions: "How do instructors and students use textbooks?" and "How can we develop textbooks that better support teaching and learning?" To answer these questions, the project will complete a comprehensive educational research study that includes gathering data from multiple classrooms in a variety of settings, and subsequent analysis of that data. The development portion of the project will focus on PreTeXt, a publishing system designed to encourage the creation of free, open source textbooks. The project will examine the use of existing books created with PreTeXt, and from these observations further develop the PreTeXt platform, so that open source textbooks can have increased effectiveness. The integration of research and development activities is designed to create a continuous cycle of innovation between the research and development activities. The education research component of this project will study 49 courses taught at two-year colleges, and four-year colleges and universities. These courses include first-year calculus, second-year linear algebra, and upper-division abstract algebra. The research study will investigate the work of instructors in planning and teaching lessons drawn from an online textbook and the work of students as they use the same textbooks to learn the material. In addition, the study will contrast such work with the work that instructors and students do when using less dynamic resources, e.g., a PDF or bound copy of the same material. PreTeXt is a new authoring platform that enables authors to easily fashion a textbook for both print (static) and online (dynamic) formats, including both computational and interactive components in the online version. The project will continue the development of PreTeXt and the technical underpinnings to create high quality online versions of textbooks, while only requiring authors to concentrate on their content. The accessibility features for readers with disabilities will be further improved. The inherent technical structure of online PreTeXt books will allow automated collection of student textbook usage data, organized by individual reader, with resolution to the minute and at the level of individual components, such as viewing a video. This interplay between research and development activities will produce large amounts of high-quality data about students' use of their textbooks. The Open Textbook Initiative at the American Institute of Mathematics will continue and expand its leadership in vetting and recommending quality free and low-cost textbooks, and help other STEM disciplines to adopt its successful evaluation criteria. Workshops for instructors, authors, and software developers will blend dissemination, professional development, editorial review, and software development. A novel feature of these workshops will be teaching test-site instructors how to contribute to the improvement of the open source textbooks that they are using in their courses.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.