ChemWiki, Open-licensed Science Textbooks, Selected as Featured Book by College Open Textbooks

June 25, 2012 - PRLog -- SAN JOSE, CA – June 25, 2012 -  Created and vetted by both instructors and students for accuracy, ChemWiki was selected by College Open Textbooks as the June-July 2012 Featured Book on its website and within its open education community.  ChemWiki, a collection of online textbooks, was selected as the featured book because of its breadth and depth as well as the quality of the content, its accuracy, and the growing support of the science community.  Providing open-licensed science content options, it includes more than 6,800 pages with high-quality illustrations and it provides maps to popular commercial general, organic, and physical textbooks. Individual pages can be printed or turned into Adobe PDF files.  

Professor Delmar Larsen of the University of California at Davis heads the ChemWiki project, a series of online textbooks including Analytical, Biological, Inorganic, Organic, Physical, and Theoretical Chemistry plus the History of Chemistry and Lab Techniques. All are licensed Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike.
Accounting for 14 of the 51 new and newly identified open textbook adoptions, ChemWiki has spawned PhysWiki, MathWiki, BioWiki, GeoWiki and more. Two of the College Open Textbook grantee communities are based on the UC Davis series including: “3-D Molecular Models in ChemWiki” with Dr. Ron Rusay and colleagues at Diablo Valley Community College and the “PhysWiki Dynamic Textbook project”, led by Professor Erik Christensen at South Florida Community College and College Open Textbooks’ 2010 Outstanding Open Textbooks Advocate/Trainer.

Students and instructors contribute to the textbooks that are constantly improved. Contributors include more than thirty chemistry professors and students as well as web technologists and publicist Richard Osibanjo. Currently, ChemWiki has 2971 registered ACTIVE Module contributors who support the effort.  Many colleges and universities have started to incorporate the UC Davis ChemWiki into their courses including Columbia University, Contra Costa College, Diablo Valley College, Hope College, J. Sargent Reynolds Community College, New Mexico State University at Alamogodro, University of Minnesota at Morris, Florida State University and Truman State University.

A special feature of the UC Davis wiki texts is the Student Ability Rating and Inquiry System (SARIS), a tool for tracking student progress based on PracticeZone.  It is part of ChemVantage, an open licensed academic program learning and assessment program for general chemistry that includes jargon used in mastering video games. Created by Chuck Wright of the University of Utah, students can practice proposed solutions to the problems and use the feedback to correct their errors prior to the assignment deadline.

For more information on ChemWiki and its collection, visit http://chemwiki.ucdavis.edu

About College Open Textbooks:
Funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and other generous sponsors*, College Open Textbooks (COT) is a project of the Silicon Valley Education Foundation and the Open Doors Group. The COT Collaborative is collection of colleges, governmental agencies, education non-profits, and other education-related organizations that are focused on the mission of driving awareness, adoptions, and affordability of open textbooks. COT’s focus is on community colleges and other 2-year institutions of higher education and the first two years (lower division) of 4-year institutions. For more information, visit http://collegeopentextbooks.org or contact Sharyn Fitzpatrick at sharyn.fitzpatrick@happyabout.info.