Researchers at Penn State University have been piloting a technology that allows faculty (and students) to build e-textbooks algorithmically using keywords to gather together materials from open resources. The system is called the Open Textbook Project, and it was developed by researchers in the School of Information Studies (SIS) with support from the National Science Foundation. Keywords are used to find an initial set of resources; adding the most relevant resources to a chapter then allows the algorithm to refine results for additional materials. Users can rearrange the materials within a chapter or reorganise entire chapters as they go, via a click-and-drag interface.
Researchers at Penn State University have been piloting a technology that allows faculty (and students) to build e-textbooks algorithmically using keywords to gather together materials from open resources. The tool, called BBookX, lets users generate textbooks chapter by chapter, adding materials by using keywords to find relevant resources, which can then be organised and edited by the user. Keywords are used to find an initial set of resources; adding the most relevant resources to a chapter then allows the algorithm to refine results for additional materials. Users can rearrange the materials within a chapter or reorganise entire chapters as they go, via a click-and-drag interface.