EAGER: Collaborative Research: Infrastructure for Collaborative Faculty Textbook Communities

Portland State University, Portland OR

Investigators

Abstract

The goal of this project is to develop infrastructure useful for sharing domain-specific course materials with collaborating Computer Science faculty sharing expertise in a particular domain. The centerpiece of the infrastructure is a free online-textbook; however the infrastructure also includes a membership-controlled area for course materials including projects, homeworks, experience reports, video lectures, and slides. This project will advance the state of the art for two relevant Computer Science textbooks, Operating Systems and Introduction to Performance. This content will serve as test material for a more general infrastructure to be developed for the purpose of developing Collaborative Faculty Textbook Communities. They key idea is to use the infrastructure to encourage and ease faculty contribution to, and adoption of, free online textbooks for their courses. The novel aspect is to focus on what the best infrastructure would be for a community of faculty, encouraging the longer-term maintenance and updating of the relevant course materials, and also encourage the participation of faculty with a high level of expertise and limited time.