The objective of this project is to develop a storyboard defining a detailed roadmap for an entire interactive eTextbook on data structures and algorithms, an end-to-end framework for the development process, and several complete prototype sections. The project improves the development of future eTextbooks by demonstrating ways to integrate text, interactivity, and assessment in a creative commons environment. The integration of online textbook content, interactive courseware, collaborative creation, open source, and online assessment benefits students, instructors, content authors, and algorithm visualization developers.
Interactive hypertextbooks are valuable beyond Computer Science since online instruction in many fields can be enhanced by student interaction with well-designed simulations. The project provides an exemplar of how collaborative, open-sourced workflows could be used to develop hypertextbooks for many disciplines. The goal is to allow instructors to modify existing eTextbooks by adopting major portions and then changing sections, or taking text and visualizations from different books and combining them.
Our work during the course of this grant has resulted in a number of important improvements to the Quadbase baseline. Multiple choice, free response, and multipart questions welcomed the addition of matching questions to the mix. Matching questions have been incorporated in our development baseline and will be deployed to the live site following a testing phase. Multiple choice questions also now support partial credit on their answer choices. For a while now, authors have been able to organize draft questions in lists. Two new list-related features have been added this year. First, lists can now be publicly shared. They can also serve as the question source for an exciting new feature, practice widgets. A practice widget can be embedded in any other site to give that site's users the chance to work through Quadbase questions. Ideally, if a student gets a question wrong, they'd be able to practice on a new iteration of that problem, e.g. one where the numbers or background have changed but the underlying question remains the same. The recently-added "dynamic" questions feature does just this. It lets authors add a small amount of logic to questions so that a student can get virtually endless variations of it. The dynamic questions feature is implemented and will be fully released soon. Other pending features that are awaiting production testing include the "embargo" capability and the QTI export function. Embargoing a question lets an author use the question in other sites (e.g. OpenStax Tutor) without that question being publicly available on Quadbase. This helps prevent students from cheating by looking up solutions on Quadbase. Questions can be embargoed for a maximum of 6 months. QTI exporting lets anyone get a question formatted according to the QTI specification. QTI is an old, somewhat unmaintained standard, but it is the most known available option for a common sharing format. Work has also begun on changes to let Quadbase host questions from other sites distributed under different licenses. We are also excited about the next evolution of Quadbase, OpenStax Exercises. OpenStax Exercises takes our progress in Quadbase and adds a significantly more responsive editor, a published and versioned API, and the advancement of many of the features listed above.
