Chemical Education Today
Editorial
JCE LivTexts: Living Textbooks for Chemistry We introduce in this issue a new collection in the JCE Digital Library: JCE LivTexts (p 1880). The first example is Quantum States of Atoms and Molecules, a collection of chapters that initiates a Living Textbook for Physical Chemistry. Together with a board of physical chemists who have extensive experience with online learning aids, Theresa Zielinski (a coauthor of Quantum States of Atoms and Molecules) will oversee and act as curator of the Living Textbook for Physical Chemistry. We strongly encourage you to make use of this resource. More importantly we urge you to contribute to JCE LivTexts. The JCE LivTexts project has several goals: • Making available online resources that support student learning much as printed textbooks do • Treating subject matter comprehensively in units that can be combined in different ways • Providing for updating material to include the latest research • Ensuring high quality of content and pedagogy • Enabling many authors to make small (or large) contributions to the overall project • Providing a consistent, familiar style and interface • Encouraging innovative approaches to content, pedagogy, and curriculum
Our model is JCE itself, but extrapolated into the digital era and intended for direct use by students. Many authors contribute to this Journal, some in greater measure than others, the quality of their work is evaluated and enhanced by reviewers and editors, and what they have written is interpreted for students by thousands of teachers. We anticipate the same broad range of authors and means of assuring quality that have always characterized the Journal; however, authors of LivTexts will be able communicate directly (via the Internet) with a student audience. Also, authors will be able to use a much broader range of media and techniques to enhance learning. Just as printed textbooks are used now as the cornerstone of most courses, we anticipate that JCE LivTexts will be used in the future as fundamental tools around which courses will be organized and that will enable and encourage students to learn. This is a tall order—one that will require substantial intellectual investment and a great deal of hard work from many chemistry educators. But the payoff will be curricula and pedagogies that are much more flexible and innovative and will greatly enhance student learning. There are many complaints about printed textbooks: they are too long, they do not include up-to-date treatments informed by current research, they include topics that are not needed or obsolete, they do not support the best pedagogy as determined by chemical education research, and they overload students with more content than can possibly be understood and learned long-term. An appropriately constructed living textbook would not require the conformity currently imposed on nearly all instructors by textbooks that need to satisfy nearly every member of nearly every selection committee. Each person www.JCE.DivCHED.org
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organizing a course could select both the content and I challenge you to join us pedagogy appropriate to his and help make this or her students’ interests and abilities by choosing and linking appropriate extension of JCE into the units from the living textdigital age as good book. Though the collection would be encyclopedic, as it can possibly be. what a student would see would be much more specific to the teacher’s and student’s needs. What a student would see would also be more innovative and would make use of many more media for supporting instruction. For example, an article on p 1871 in this issue demonstrates that application-oriented tutorials that allow students to manipulate 3D molecular structures and that connect macroscopic properties to atomic-scale structure can help students learn better than conventional instruction. A much broader range of animations, videos, tutorials, assessments, and means of communication among students and between students and teachers is possible online than is available in typical courses today. If units that make use of these features are contributed to JCE LivTexts, then those features will become available to many more students. To achieve the major step forward in chemical education that is possible via JCE LivTexts we need your cooperation and collaboration. Here are some of the ways you might contribute: • Oversee one or more subject-matter areas within a subdiscipline or even an entire subdiscipline as the curator of the JCE Living Textbook of Physical Chemistry is doing. • Serve on an editorial board for a subject-matter area. • Review online materials and help select those that will be included. • Become an author of a unit or single item that supports online instruction. • Help link that content of a unit or chapter to other resources available through JCE Online or on the Web at large. • Contribute to the JCE LivTexts collection something similar to Quantum States of Atoms and Molecules that you have written in any field of chemical science.
Anyone who is in any way interested in sharing ideas, materials, or plain hard work in support of this project should contact me by email (
[email protected]). JCE LivTexts is a major project that will require hundreds of contributions of online instructional units and thousands of contributions of time and effort to review submissions and ensure quality. I challenge you to join us and help make this extension of JCE into the digital age as good as it can possibly be.
Vol. 82 No. 12 December 2005
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Journal of Chemical Education
1751
