POSE: Phase I: An Open-Source Ecosystem for the Creation and Use of Accessible Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Open Education Resources

University Of South Alabama, Mobile AL

Investigators

Abstract

This project is funded by Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) Program which seeks to harness the power of open-source development for the creation of new technology solutions to problems of national and societal importance. Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) educational materials that are open-sourced and made freely available to learners and educators, known as Open Educational Resources (OER), require an infrastructure that exceeds the quality of commercial alternatives. This project scopes the creation of an Open-Source Ecosystem (OSE) consisting of two existing open-source products: PreTeXt for authoring scholarly documents and textbooks suitable for all areas of STEM, and the Runestone learning engineering and analytics portal for publishing OER textbooks that support both instruction and education research in K-12 and higher education. The long-term societal impacts of this OSE are open-source textbooks that are made freely available to the nation’s STEM classrooms and students through the Open-Source Ecosystem’s support of instructors, authors, and researchers. Furthermore, the OER has the potential to reflect cutting-edge advancements in STEM education research by removing the barriers between researchers, authors, instructors, and students. PreTeXt-authored works can be converted into HTML, print, and braille formats, enabling the resulting Open Educational Resources to be accessible to a wide range of learners at no cost, an equitable approach to ensuring that all students have the same access to education. The scoping activities include curating methods to create multifaceted, accessible, and interactive STEM education content, and providing mechanisms for students, instructors, content authors, and researchers to seamlessly interact with textbook materials to produce and utilize analytics. The team will hold virtual meetings of stakeholders throughout the first half of the project, culminating in an in-person summit at the end of the project. Evaluation of the project will include qualitative feedback from meeting participants and experts across the larger STEM OER community, including those from alternative OER platforms and aggregators. The project aims to support the development of an infrastructure and governance structure for a sustainable and robust Open-Source Ecosystem in service of Open Educational Resources communities. 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.