The project is a collaboration involving Texas A&M University, Stanford University, The Pennsylvania State University, California State University Long Beach, and, Prairie View A&M University. The team of investigators is developing a continuously updated online textbook on energy sustainability to support core science and engineering courses for both majors and non majors. The project builds on an earlier NSF project in which attempts to develop a traditional textbook suggested the need for alternative educational material for such a dynamic and extensive field. This need is being met by an online resource that grows and is updated systematically as the knowledge base expands, using technologies that are not available in a typical printed textbook. The textbook addresses fossil, alternative, and renewable energy sources; energy conversions, utilization and extraction; and environmental impacts. The project goals are to: (1) implement collaborative technology that enables many content writers to work simultaneously (2) write the textbook content and assemble it in a form that is effective for each of the partner institutions, (3) assess the pedagogical value to student learning compared to that with a printed textbook, (4) conduct outreach to underrepresented groups in the K-12 teacher population as potential developers and users of the created on line content, and (5) disseminate the textbook itself and study results assessing its pedagogical value. Evaluation efforts, under the direction of an independent expert, are using an assortment of approaches to monitor (1) the impact of the online textbook on student content leaning, attitudes about energy and the engineering field, and learning skills with online resources; (2) the characteristics of faculty collaboration in developing online resources; and (3) the adoption of the developed resources. The Connexions website is being used to publicize and disseminate the textbook; evaluation results will be posted on the investigators' website, presented at engineering education conferences, and described in journal articles. Broader impacts include the collaboration among a diverse set of institutions, the focus on underrepresented groups in the K-12 outreach, and the dissemination of the material and evaluation results.
The Live Energy project team included 5 professors, Dr. Anthony R. Kovscek, Stanford University, Dr. Sarma V. Pisupati, The Pennsylvania State University, Dr. Reza Toossi , California State University Long Beach, and Dr. Sukesh Aghara, now with the University of Massachessetts Lowel, 2 learning scientists, Dr. Bugrahan Yalvac and Dr. Emily Binks Cantrell, the project manager, Don Gilman, Dr. Dennie Smith who served as project evaluator, and students who provided considerable technical support all from Texas A&M University. All are grateful to NSF for funding this project and seeing the merits in our approach. When we began this collaboration most of the team had never met, and as we reach the end of the project this is still the case. Rather, all of us have worked together in weekly virtual teleconference meetings to accomplish the project goals. We also made use of real time collaborative environments including Google docs and DropBox and an Access database custom designed to manage permissions for images used in the book. At this point we have completed an iBook and found a publisher for the content on multiple eBook platforms. We chose to go with the iBook platform at the time because it was by far the most advanced platform for preparing the book with the level of interactivity, color, and flexibility that we had in mind, but iBooks features can be fully appreciated only on Apple devices, principally the iPad. The publisher that we are not engaging arranged peer review that provided very useful input we were able to incorporate into the content. Our publisher of choice, Kendall Hunt, is agreeing to do an eBook with all of the features that originally attracted us to the iBook platform and to enable us the option to do updates of the book to keep the energy topics current. Since we began this work, there have been many important changes in the energy landscape, and we anticipate this will continue in the future. Two research efforts accompanied the eBook creation. One focused on the community of practice and documented the nature and the discourse of the faculty collaboration by conducting an instrumental case study with ethnographic data collection approaches that included recordings of weekly teleconference meetings and one-to-one interviews and found that individual identities emerged along with a common language and repertoire and the evolution of mutual engagement and community goals among engineering professors and the learning scientists where both groups practiced a common task and learned from each other. The other research effort compared student content learning and attitudes while using a conventional print textbook (baseline) and after introducing the iBook. The comparison of student questionnaire responses before and after the iBook and eBook introductions suggest that while the impact on content learning and attitudes about engineering were essentially the same, students' perceptions of the e-book were fairly neutral, slightly favorable, with little deviation. Technological difficulties did not appear to be a major issue. However, because over half of the students viewed the book in PDF form rather than in an iBook and would not have been able to utilize all of the interactive features, we decided to compare the perceptions of those who used iBook versus those who did not. Analyses revealed that those who used iBook had statistically significantly higher perceptions of the e-book on all items as compared to those who did not use iBook and that a higher percentage of students actually read the text in the iBook form and that being able to use all of the interactive features via the iBook platform may have played a role in students' perceptions of the e-book. The authors are now continuing to work as a team with the publisher to arrange regular, very likely annual, eBook updates and to continue using the book in our energy courses. We will also work with Kendall Hunt to interest faculty in other universities in the eBook, and very likely there will be interest as well at the secondary school level.
