Getting the UTMOST out of Open-Source Resources
By: Audrey Malagon, Lead Editor of DUE Point, Virginia Wesleyan University
The quadratic formula in Braille. Credit: American Institute of Mathematics
More than ever, students and faculty need access to quality, open-source educational materials, and software. The project team for UTMOST, "Undergraduate Teaching of Mathematics with Open Software and Textbooks," has been investigating, developing, and refining such resources for over a decade. Rob Beezer of the University of Puget Sound tells us about the project, now in its third round of NSF funding, which has supported many open-source mathematical resources.
Tell us about the project, how it started, and who is involved.
The first UTMOST grant proposal came from William Stein, Jason Grout, Rob Beezer, and Kiran Kedlaya, developers of the open-source mathematical software Sage, along with open-source textbook author and education researcher Tom Judson. This followed extensive groundwork and assistance from David Farmer and Kent Morrison at the American Institute of Mathematics, which became the lead institution. Project goals included making the Sage Notebook Server scale beyond workgroups, providing Sage as a service, integrating Sage into open-source textbooks, and studying the effect of free, powerful, and integrated computations on mathematics textbooks and courses.
The project went on to initiate and support several other projects and is now also focused on educational research into how these materials are used in classrooms. Vilma Mesa and her colleagues at the University of Michigan joined the team to support this goal. Megan Littrell serves as an external evaluator and the advisory board includes Stein, Grout, Kedlaya, and Gavin LaRose.
What projects have been initiated as part of the UTMOST grant?
CoCalc is an inexpensive hosting service for online open-source software for mathematics, featuring Sage, and designed to support both research and classroom use. The Sage Cell Server does online Sage computations, entirely free, hosted, and maintained with financial support from later UTMOST grants. PreTeXt is a markup language and publishing system for open-source textbooks in multiple output formats and multiple disciplines, making it possible for one source to be converted to virtually any output format. Finally, the Open Textbook Initiative, a project of the American Institute of Mathematics, is a catalog of undergraduate textbooks vetted by an editorial board. These were initiated in the first UTMOST grant and continue today. The current grant supports the Sage Cell Server and the Open Textbook Initiative. This work includes integrating Sage into electronic textbooks in addition to researching how these materials are used.
How have you seen the importance and availability of open-source materials changing in recent years?
The biggest change is that it is no longer necessary to compromise on quality when choosing an open-source textbook. The features that PreTeXt provides automatically-- accessibility, intuitive interface, beautiful layout, multiple modes of interactivity, and more--meet or exceed what is available from commercial publishers. CoCalc provides a convenient, inexpensive, and powerful hosting service for Sage and other open software for mathematics, and the Sage Cell Server is like a water fountain - fundamental, always on, always free, always easy. The Open Textbook Initiative has encouraged the development of ecosystems around open textbooks, which include contributions beyond those of the textbook authors.
What features facilitate teaching and learning using open-source textbooks? What hinders it?
Electronic versions have improved navigational features, such as a much more capable index, and allow embedded interactive features like videos or demonstrations. PreTeXt creates various electronic versions of a text from a single source. This gives universal access on a variety of devices. Every student has the textbook on the first day of class, and when classes suddenly went online during Spring 2020, even students who could not return to campus had their textbooks.
A freely-available online textbook can be easily integrated into an online classroom presentation or a discussion during virtual office hours. We’ve also seen increased interest in creating lecture notes with PreTeXt.
Our education research study shows how various features are used. We have found that it takes instructors time to adapt and envision the potential of new and innovative features. We have hoped that some instructors will modify texts to suit their own course, but the overhead in getting started with PreTeXt seems to have limited this.
What impact has the project had so far?
By helping, authors create quality open-source textbooks, with features that exceed those of commercial textbooks, and at a much lower cost, we have eliminated the stigma associated with self-publishing. Our educational research study provides input into the design of novel features and shows that open texts are just as effective as commercial ones. By integrating computation and demonstrations, these books bring the power of computation to more students early in their education.
We are currently well along in a project to convert PreTeXt books into Braille, using Nemeth Braille for the mathematics. You can read more about the utmost project at https://utmost.aimath.org/ and specifically our work with Braille at https://aimath.org/aimnews/braille_full/
Learn more about NSF DUE 1821706
Full Project Name: Collaborative Research: Undergraduate Teaching and Learning in Mathematics With Open Software and Textbooks
Abstract: https://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1821706
Project Contact: Rob Beezer, beezer@ups.edu
*Responses in this blog were edited for length and clarity.
For more information on any of these programs, follow the links, and follow these blog posts. This blog is a project of the Mathematical Association of America, produced with financial support of NSF DUE Grant #1626337.
Audrey Malagon is lead editor of DUE Point and a Batten Associate Professor of Mathematics at Virginia Wesleyan University with research interests in inquiry-based and active learning, election security, and Lie algebras. Find her on Twitter @malagonmath.