This hyper textbook project is a team effort led by the University of California at Davis with participation by Sonoma State University, Diablo Valley College, Contra Costa Community College, Hope College, and University of Minnesota at Morris. The partnership is developing, delivering and expanding transformative content for chemistry education within a single, integrated online resource known as The ChemWiki. The ChemWiki is organized around a collaborative approach to chemistry education where an Open Access textbook is constantly being written and re-written, partly by students and partly by faculty, resulting in a no-fee, high-quality textbook, accessible anytime, anywhere, by anyone with internet access. The ChemWiki is enabling Wikitexts to be created by individual faculty by ordering modular content in a way that is meeting localized needs, and is allowing other Core Modules to be modified via an embedded graphical editor, and then incorporated into the Wikitext. The ever growing list of Wikitexts is available for anyone to peruse, adapt and adopt as needs dictate. The ChemWiki is incorporating a separate application, the 'Student Ability Rating and Inquiry System' (SARIS) that is addressing the need for student practice, by incorporating an extensive question database augmented with links to the ChemWiki core material. SARIS is providing quiz and homework questions, drawn from a deep pool, and is providing students with immediate formative feedback designed to enhance their problem-solving skills.
The ChemWiki is enabling student participatory learning by engaging them in the content construction. The nature of The ChemWiki modular concept is permitting content to be used and re-used in multiple courses at multiple levels. The open and dynamic nature of The ChemiWiki is allowing both straightforward error correction and timely content with near instantaneous modification possible for state-of-the-art material. The multiple author construction approach is enhancing usage flexibility by the very nature of the breadth of strategies employed. Finally, the inter-institutional development scheme is leading to a product of distinct value across a broad swath of institutions of higher education.
