Jun
19
Free Digital Textbook Initiative: CLRN’s Review Process
June 19, 2009 | Tagged Free Digital Textbook Initiative | 1 Comment
With textbook submissions complete, CLRN is now turning our attention to reviewing the 20 free textbooks that have been submitted for review. In the first phase, CLRN searched for and contacted a variety of open source content developers to encourage them to participate in the Governor’s initiative. We weren’t expecting that there would be scores of available books, but we were surprised by the existence of several projects that either create or collect open source textbooks. Today’s post is about CLRN’s review of these digital textbooks.
CLRN’s Textbook Review Process
- Because traditional textbooks represent a “full course of study” and they are not interactive, we modified our entry process, created customized standards correlation documents, and provided publishers with personal assistance during their submission.
- During the week of June 22nd, CLRN will conduct science reviews at Humboldt County Office of Education and mathematics reviews at Kings County Office of Education.
- While CLRN’s review coordinators and trained reviewers are highly competent in their subject areas, CLRN staff will attend reviews.
- Counter to CLRN’s reviews of supplemental electronic learning resources, textbook reviews will be limited to verifying each and every content standard. CLRN will not be applying California’s Social Content criteria, as we do with electronic learning resource reviews.
- For those standards that are partially met, CLRN’s reviewers will annotate which parts of a standard are missing. This information will later be available within our published reviews.
- While these are digital textbooks, we have printed out two copies of each book for our reviewers to make it easier to find the standards outlined in the publisher’s standards correlation documents and the textbook.
- The amount of time it will take to review each book is unknown and is subject to several conditions: how long is the book? (some books are longer than 1000 pages); how many standards are within the particular subject? (geometry has 22 standards while chemistry has 73); how complex is each standard?; and how many standards are partially met?
Once CLRN’s reviewers have completed their work, each review site coordinator will review the results, make corrections, and forward the results back to CLRN central. The entire process is performed online using CLRN’s database. CLRN will then verify that all standards have been reviewed and we will make any corrections to the annotations within partially-met standards. Review results will then be shared with each publisher who will have seven days to respond to any comments or provide additional evidence of their standard’s match. All results will be embargoed until the Governor’s release on August 10th.
free digital textbook initiative CLRN California
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[...] anyone seek, let alone listen, to Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski? Free Digital Textbook Initiative: CLRN’s Review Process – bbridges51.edublogs.org 06/19/2009 With textbook submissions complete, CLRN is now turning [...]