Editable eBooks Overview
OpenStax is a non-profit publisher with over 65 free textbooks. As a formal partner of theirs, we build technology to accompany their books.
Available Now
- Our Coverage: Our editor is available for all OpenStax titles.
- Cost: $15 per student per semester, $10 per student per quarter.
- Editor Capabilities: Instructors can rearrange, remove chapters or sections, rewrite, change/add images, add new sections/chapters, or easily do more advanced things like embed YouTube videos or PheT simulations. In our side-by-side editor, you can make changes to a given area and see an instant preview.
- Continuously Update: When you have edits that are a work-in-progress, click ‘Save’. When you are ready to make changes live to your students, Expert TA’s team can help you push those updates to the version your students see. Update as often as you like, including during the term.
- Online Homework: We have a powerful online homework system that can accompany any book. For selected texts, Expert TA has fully built out libraries of questions, just waiting to be assigned. For other subjects, the authoring platform allows instructors to author their own questions, or code in questions from the OpenStax books.
Coming in Fall 2024
- Rich Text Editor: As easy as editing a Word document. Edit in place; What you see is what you get.
- Equation Editor: Full featured equation editor that also supports LaTeX. Equations appear in their formatted form. A simple left-click allows you to open the math formula within the equation editor.
- Full Featured eReader Your custom version will be distributed in our sleek online eReader with features that allow students to highlight and make notes.
- Instructor Messaging: Instructors have the ability highlight and make notes. Instructors can choose if they’d like to make their highlights and notes visible to the entire class. As students read and look through the text, they see material that the instructor is drawing attention to.
Our Vision
Our long-term goal is to help make the best textbooks ever written, and keep them at an affordable price indefinitely, something on the order of $15. The Editable eBooks platform is the start of that. As instructors make edits, they can opt-in and allow those edits to benefit the community. Other instructors will be able to see those changes, but so will our editorial teams.
As Wikipedia demonstrated, there is great power in opening something up to input from the community. Imagine how good any given textbook can be, after the instructor community at-large has weighed in on it over the course of several years.
Almost all of our early adopters have opted-in, allowing us to take the best of their edits and roll them into our main version of the books.
Note: We understand the importance of credit where credit is due. Any and all edits that make their way into a main version, will be cited and/or acknowledged appropriately.
Our role is to help by creating a platform that facilitates such large scale collaboration, as well as establishing and overseeing the editorial teams that will curate the information, evaluate individual customizations, and decide how to update the textbooks accordingly.
Interested in being part of the Editorial Team for one of the books? Use the form on this page to get in contact with us.