Dear all,
This letter is a part of an attempt to organise a group of instructors
and programmers to initiate a basis for the free exchange of teaching
material.
Many of you receiving this letter regularly give lectures and exams
and most of us would be more than willing to exchange teaching
material. Several of us have found that there is little financial
gain in publishing text books and prefer to simply give our students
access to such material on a web site. Similarly, we often exchange
electronic transparencies in a variety of formats. The project
presented here is designed to facilitate such exchanges in a very
general setting by standardising a framework using approaches which
many of us already use and providing a server. Such a project could
do for educational material what Wikipedia is doing to the
encyclopedia and projects such as Wikibook or Project Gutenberg are
doing to textbooks and classics respectively. If this intrigues you,
please read on.
The system we are planning to use as a basis for these ideas is the
tutor-web, with more information and links available from
http://www.tutor-web.info and more detail given in the attachment.
This letter is merely a survey. It is important to get some initial
feel for what can be expected in terms of potentially existing content
and interest. I am looking for responses to the following questions:
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(A) Do you have any of the following types of material which can be
submitted to such a repository (please also list topic,
e.g. multivariate analysis or calculus etc):
* Transparancies in LaTeX format
* Text (as in several-page handouts) in LaTeX format
* Quiz questions and answers in ASCII or LaTeX
* Graphics in jpg, png, ps or as fig, latex, gnuplot or R code.
We can not use Powerpoint and Word is not initially feasible - only
open formats are initially supported. Note that these text must be
open-content, i.e. freely distributable and modifiable by anyone, but
are copyrighted by the author using an appropriate copyright notice.
(B) Please list your own name and position and state the level of the
material (high school, college, graduate).
(C) Please state whether you will be able to contribute in any way to
further editing of the material as a part of entering it into the
common base or to develop quiz questions. Please also indicate
whether you have access to teaching assistants/graduate students for
such work. Most teaching assistants have grading as a part of their
work and I have found it very useful to offer them to skip the grading
in exchange for submitting quiz questions instead.
(D) Do you have (access to) programming expertise which could be
harnessed in order to enhance the system itself. This consists of web
programming using Zope, Plone and Python.
(E) Do you see yourself as a potential user of such material if it is
of sufficient quality?
(F) Would you point your students to such material, e.g. for reading
or self-evaluation?
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Hoping to hear from you
Gunnar Stefansson
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Marine Research Institute Univ. of Iceland
P.O. Box 1390 Science Institute
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