LibreTexts Announces New Grant to Expand ADAPT Homework System

The LibreTexts team is excited to announce that we have been awarded $4 million over the next four years from the California Education Learning Lab (CELL) to significantly scale up ADAPT, the open homework and learning system built to complement the texts in our libraries and enhance the utility of the greater LibreVerse. This support will expand ADAPT into a powerful and expansive open-source infrastructure for educators to access and for direct use in student assessment and learning activities.

ADAPT combines the features of multiple assessment systems (IMathAS, Webwork, H5P, LMS-QTI, and other custom assessment technologies) under a single system that is more than the sum of its parts. ADAPT empowers traditional homework delivery (both formative and summative), embedded questioning in textbooks, and adaptive learning capabilities to allow students to guide their learning experience subject to their decisions with our Learning Trees. The new award will be used to expand the library of Learning Trees to include broader diversity in representation of exposition modules and to rebuild questions to support culturally relevant pedagogy approaches and encourage a greater engagement by stimulating students’ identities within the platform. A mobile app will be released this Spring to allow ADAPT to be used for in-class polling (e.g., clickers).

We hope you will consider joining us as we look for partners to help us build new, open content for inclusion in ADAPT’s ever-growing question and assessment bank, which currently hosts over 133,000 assessments and growing. Please contact us for more details at info@libretexts.org.

See the official press release for additional details:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

Contact: Jennifer Rogers, LibreTexts Outreach Coordinator 

Email: jrogers@libretexts.org

LibreTexts Project Announces $4 Million Award from California Education Learning Lab 

Award will further develop LibreTexts open homework system, ADAPT, and make it freely available for four years to California higher education institutions

[DAVIS, CA, February 27, 2023] The LibreTexts project’s online open homework system, ADAPT, has been awarded a $4 million dollar award from the California Education Learning Lab (CELL) and the State of California. The award supports the Individualized Adaptive Learning Open Educational Resources (IAL-OER) project. The grant will be distributed in $1 million increments over the next four years (2023-2026) and immediately address equity gaps in chemistry education with a longer term goal of reducing equity gaps in other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. 

“The LibreTexts team is thrilled to accept this grant in order to help us grow our ADAPT homework system as it will help low-income students in every corner of the State of California,” said LibreTexts Founder and Executive Director, Dr. Delmar Larsen.

An estimate provided by LibreTexts to CELL and the State of California shows that during the academic year 2021-2022 approximately 1090-1450 students saved an average of $80 per student in courses where their professors were piloting ADAPT. Over a proposed ramp-up period (2021-2028), total cumulative savings are estimated to be $11.1 million. 

This grant continues the support of a previous $1 million grant from CELL awarded in 2021 for the “Rebalancing the Equity Gap in Chemistry Education with Individualized Adaptive Learning” led by Larsen, in partnership with California Community College’s Academic Senate, the California State University (CSU)’s Chancellor’s Office, CSU San Bernadino, and Mendocino College. 

These CELL funds, in conjunction with a prior $4.9 million dollar Open Textbook Pilot Grant from the US Department of Education (2018), were utilized to create a new, open homework and assessment platform, ADAPT. ADAPT was also made possible by the previous 14 years of growth and expansion of the LibreTexts platform for hosting and remixing open education resources (OER).

The pairing of the LibreTexts platform with its over half a million pages of OER, and the ADAPT homework system presents a unique and powerful opportunity to persuade disciplinary faculty to switch from their current, more expensive traditional systems, to a free, open option, especially given LibreTexts existing impact on the California higher education landscape. 

With this funding faculty can make the switch to ADAPT knowing that the quality of the ADAPT system is on par with the one(s) they currently use. ADAPT is designed to:

• be extremely easy to use.
• provide reliable and technical support for users.
• decouple the homework system from an expensive commercial textbook which provides teaching faculty with more flexibility in how they utilize OER in their courses. 

“The ADAPT homework system gives our students real-time feedback about their performance and understanding of the material. ADAPT has also created a pathway towards low and zero-cost chemistry courses at Mendocino College, reducing the cost barrier associated with other online homework systems,” says Gregory Allen, Professor of Chemistry at Mendocino College.

In addition to the current Chemistry offerings already embedded in ADAPT, this grant will allow the LibreTexts team to:

• expand on the base OER import into the system to ensure the inclusion of more varied algorithmic questions to hinder academic dishonesty.
• build an extensive learning objectives framework and align questions directly to the framework.

• build additional learning trees for adaptive learning (scaled up from the existing 120 to over 300).
• develop and Implement new technology for Organic Chemistry courses and ensure it’s been rigorously reviewed for accessibility.

For further information contact Prof. Delmar Larsen at dlarsen@libretexts.org. See https://LibreTexts.org for details about the LibreTexts project.

ABOUT LIBRETEXTS

LibreTexts is the largest, best established open education project, and platform online. Begun in 2008 as the ChemWiki, the LibreTexts mission is to unite students, faculty and scholars in a cooperative effort to develop an easy-to-use online platform for the construction, customization, and dissemination of open educational resources (OER) to reduce the burdens of unreasonable textbook costs to our students and society. LibreTexts also provides ancillary technologies for project management, remixing OER, and H5P creation which help faculty better control their curriculum by providing them more flexibility over their course content.

ABOUT CELL

Learning Lab is an initiative of the California Governor’s Office of Planning and Research and is administered in partnership with the Foundation for California Community Colleges as part of the State’s vision to grow and sustain a highly educated workforce that can meet the challenges of our changing world. Learning Lab supports innovation in higher education pedagogy through intersegmental grants to California’s public colleges and universities. Our funded projects leverage technology tools and the science of human learning to create better online and hybrid learning environments, and empower faculty in their teaching mission to find solutions that work best for California’s diverse student population. 

Cover thumbail credit: Photo by RF._.studio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-writing-on-her-notebook-3059747/