Stanford Living Textbooks
Living Textbooks
Stanford Living Textbook Project
With living textbooks, the book becomes an open source project. Contributions can be made to the content or to embedded code. Readers can propose corrections or amendments using the “forking” and “pull request” features that open source committers use to fix technical bugs or propose new features. Each living textbook gathers around it a community of authors, contributors, maintainers, translators, and others, who keep the project alive, interactive and mutually connected.
Living textbooks have named authors who reap the professional rewards of peer reviewed publishing.
In the psychology department, Prof. Mike Frank and seven colleagues used this model to publish Experimentology: An Open Science Approach to Experimental Psychology Methods. Similarly Prof. Russell Poldrack published Statistical Thinking for the 21st Century as a living textbook. Professor Jason Yeatman has created a technical manual, called ROAR, for educators to assess reading skill. And in the Doerr School of Sustainability Prof. Ines Azevedo, who coined the living textbook moniker, is co-authoring one based on an energy systems course she co-teaches with Profs. Adam Brandt and Steven Chu.
Our Vision
We are not trying to make 5 or 10 shiny PDF textbooks. We want to empower teachers everywhere to make their own—a thousand textbooks or more—by engaging an open, participatory community in which we leverage the scale and power of Github, and provide the training and skills that instructors around the world need in order to fork, remix, and make their own textbooks in this new medium. We are starting with high quality scholarship from Stanford, but that is only the beginning of this story.
Contact Information
Stanford Digital Education
408 Panama Mall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
email: pfiden@stanford.edu
Zach Chandler
email: zechandl@stanford.edu
Matthew Rascoff
email: mzrascoff@stanford.edu