EduTechnologic will will assess and validate student progress for LibreTexts

Press Release: October 4, 2018

Columbus, Ohio – The LibreText Project is fortunate to accept a $5 million Open Textbooks Pilot Program award from the Department of Education funded by Congress in the 2018 Fiscal Year omnibus spending bill. These funds will be used to decrease the burden of textbook costs on college students while increasing the availability, usage and educational value of open textbooks that are freely available to download, edit, and share to better serve all students.  

The mission of the LibreTexts project 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), particularly for courses relevant to academic programs, to reduce the burdens of unreasonable textbook costs to our students and society.

As part of this project EduTechnologic will will assess and validate student progress according to their performance on each of the subject matter topics (e.g., atomic structure, acids and bases, chemical bonding, solutions and mixtures). Assessment tasks consistent with each topic will be designed along with expected task performance rubrics (examples of expected responses and scoring categories or codes). These rubrics will be informed by known misconceptions about subject matter topics as well as appropriate and correct responses. Student progress will be evaluated with regard to known learning progressions toward understanding of chemistry topics.

EduTechnologic will analyze the data using a hybrid method constructed using analytic tools from Microsoft’s Azure cloud services and IBM’s Watson.  The analysis will include a pre and post tests to baseline the users existing knowledge and will assess the learner’s time on task, and random tests pushed to the user to assess the users performance.  

EduTechnologic has worked with LibreTexts on a mobile/wearable Virtual Chemistry Lab to gamify chemistry that was also designed to work on RealWear’s HMT-1.  

For more than 10 years, EduTechnologic has provided augmented reality, wearable devices and advanced technological solutions for industry and has more than 25 years of industry experience.  EduTechnologic also recently announced joining the Midwest Manufacturing Partnership with TriRivers/RAMTEC and Yaskawa Motoman.