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Next up in our series of Educator Snapshots, we have Kate Cottrell, one of our K-12MATH course designers.

Hello Kate, thanks for taking the time to let us and our readers get to know you! Let’s get started with our first question. What work have you done with the Saylor Foundation?

I am developing the fully-loaded Geometry course for the K-12 courses.

Great, we are happy to have you here. Our K-12MATH: Geometry course is live and running. Thank you! When you’re not developing courses, what else keeps you busy? 

I am a middle school math teacher at Gimnasio La Montaña, a school in Bogotá, Colombia. Next year I will take on a new role as Director of Teacher Support and Development.

Read the rest of this page »

Want to be able to remix and use free and open textbooks to your liking? Looking to learn concepts quickly with the help of “bite-sized” lessons? Then let’s get started! CK-12 can act as your trusty sidekick, or better yet your vehicle to help you to teach others and learn! CK-12 provides you with tools to watch videos, take quizzes, and engage in interactive activities. And what’s more, instructors can choose from and/or change the content to best fit the their courses and required standards.
So how does this help each of us?

Us Here at Saylor
Many of our newer K-12 courses use this resource to teach concepts. Look for it in our assignments section of our

• TPREP101: SAT prep
• K12ELA11: American Literature
• K12MATH: Algebra I
• K12MATH: Calculus AB

We’ve also used them in lots of our Saylor University courses, but our Common Core-aligned K-12 courses are newer and, you know, deserve some time in the spotlight.

Teachers
You have the ability to use CK-12′s content to your advantage as you create, build, and remix free, open, and meaningful textbooks. Common Core Standards on your mind? Don’t worry…CK-12 has content (including videos, quizzes, and activities) that is aligned with those standards and more, different levels. The amount of subjects available is truly amazing, as they range from science, to math, to English, history, and more.

Students
Explore and learn!  This resource is your oyster. Reading textbooks for fun has never been so much…fun.

With our release of An Introductory Course in Elementary Number Theory, we asked the author, Dr. Wissam Raji, Ph.D., a few questions about himself, his work, the textbook, and his thoughts on education. Learn more about the book here.

Dr. Raji, can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I am currently an assistant professor of Mathematics at the American University of Beirut (AUB), Lebanon and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Mathematical Sciences at AUB. I moved to the States in 2002 to join Temple University in Philadelphia where I obtained my Ph.D. in mathematics in 2006. My field of research is analytic number theory. I am also the president and founder of an NGO called the Center for Development, Democracy and Governance (CDDG), operating in Lebanon, whose main mission is to promote good democratic practices and rural development.

What problems do you work on in mathematics?

I am a number theorist whose main research concentration is the theory of automorphic forms and automorphic integrals. In the last four years, I have been working on Eichler isomorphism theorems between the space of modular forms and the cohomology group of period polynomials. I teach graduate and undergraduate courses in Mathematics and I also supervise graduate students seeking Master’s degrees.

Why is number theory important?

Number theory constitutes the building blocks of the fundamentals in Mathematics. It is the theory of integers, and integers are where it all started. Kronecker said: “God made integers and the rest is the work of men.”

What about for non-mathematicians?

To non-mathematicians, number theory is a brain teaser. It deals with problems which in many cases are easy to describe but hard to solve. Learning number theory disciplines the mind and creates a systematic way of thinking that attracts many people to learn more about mathematics.

What led you to write this textbook?

After using several books to teach a course on elementary number theory, I could not really find a book that addresses beginners such that one can learn the subject independently. Moreover, many books contain extra material that is good but unnecessary for students to tackle in a beginner course.

This text is intended for undegraduate students majoring in Mathematics and computer science. However, the subject is presented in a way where no mathematical background is required with the exception of the last three chapters. As a result, anybody who wishes to learn the subject can smoothly follow all the concepts presented.

How did you learn about the Open Textbook Challenge?

I was sent an email from Saylor Foundation asking me if I would referee math courses in analysis. I visited the website and found out about the open textbook challenge.

Were you previously familiar with open education initiatives or open education resources (OER)?

Not really. It was my first time learning about open education initiatives other than official videos posted on YouTube by selected professors in some U.S. universities.

How do you envision the role of higher education in the twenty-first century? How must it change? How must it stay the same?

I do believe that the evolution in education should go in harmony with all the technological development. With increasingly easy access to the internet, it is becoming clear that access for education will be free.

How do you see your role as an educator?

As an educator, I believe I should always be up to date on the developments in education. Moreover, I should always promote the belief that education should be free for everybody and thus it will be one’s choice to either develop their educational skills or not.

Any advice for learners?

My advice to students is to believe in their capabilities. It is not about the school you attend, it is all about the inner will to achieve and passion you have for the subject you are studying.

We’re happy to announce the release of a free and open textbook, An Introductory Course in Elementary Number Theory, by Dr. Wissam Raji, Ph.D., of the American University in Beirut. Fuller details are here, and be sure to check out our Q&A with the author.

Dr. Raji created this text in response to a need for a clear, concise book oriented toward those just getting started in number theory. His work was selected by the Saylor Foundation’s Open Textbook Challenge for public release under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.

The book is available in a clean, readable PDF, in .doc and EPUB, and in its native TeX for those who wish to re-mix the work for use in their classrooms. You can explore this and other titles at our bookshelf.

Perhaps you’ve heard of WorldCat, which is, in brief, “the world’s largest network of library content and services” — but to folks like you and me, that means that we can search across many different library collections for a particular holding. It’s fun, it’s convenient, and it helped Yours Truly solve an Advanced Power Searching with Google challenge. It is pretty cool.

Enter the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), which officially launched yesterday, April 18th. In the same vein as WorldCat, DPLA fills a different ecological niche. And, ladies and gentlemen, this promises to be the One Library to Rule Them All. It’s for students, teachers, researchers, writers, makers, thinkers, and the merely curious. It’s for you, whether or not you feel it yet.

In their own words:

“The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science.”

This works, this will increasingly work, because it follows one of our favorite mantras: Everybody Wins. The libraries, archives, and museums get to showcase their holdings to a broader audience while ensuring that visitors ultimately arrive at their sites; DPLAgets to take a leading role in defining our encounters with information on the Web; the public, meanwhile (and not just in the United States), gets rich, structured, easy access to the library’s “holdings”: one-stop shopping for the Information Age.

Moreover, DPLA is helping to advance the cause of Open: user-uploaded content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY), while the library metadata is given over to the public domain (CC0).

We’d go on, but the fact is that after many months of following listservs and checking in on the site, we’ve yet to dive in and just…enjoy it. But we’ll leave you with a few quick links to get up to speed:

Launch announcement
Welcome message
Timeline search (fun and profitable)
FAQ

Go explore, and let them know what you think — this thing was built just about from scratch by folks with the smarts and backing to make the digital future exactly how we want it.

Image above is author’s screenshot of a portion of the DPLA homepage on April 19, 2013.