Symposium BI01-Developing an Open Source Introductory Textbook for the Materials Community

The materials community is one of the few in science that does not have an open access textbook for the introduction of our discipline. This symposium is focussed on addressing this need and developing an efficient and continuing process to create a high quality open source electronic textbook that will be vetted by our society along with the other materials societies such as TMS, ACeRs, and ASM. We are planning on inviting top practitioners as well as emerging, young researchers in each of the foundational areas of materials science and engineering.

The main outcomes of this symposium will be to identify small editorial boards for each area and to develop a plan to write the first set of chapters. The vision is to create a server based publishing platform to permit continual updating of the chapters with editorial board oversight. New chapters can be added and expanded as time goes on. An instructor will be able to choose the sections they want and produce a pdf for their students at no cost.

The goal of this symposium is to work towards developing a sophomore level text that covers the fundamental topics that apply to all areas of materials essential to an introductory text. We expect experienced materials educators to set the scope and depth of the material in each area during planned working sessions and then to identify early career materials scientists and engineers to lead the effort for writing and editing the text, examples, worked problems, and other digital content for each topical area. The plan is to not only provide excellent up to date content, but also provide a prestigious platform for early career materials scientists and engineers to build a strong reputation in their fields. We expect that these efforts will be very valued by academic institutions for tenure and promotion decisions as well as advancement at national labs and industry. Furthermore, we expect to have wide participation across all of the materials societies and include broad international participation in this effort.

We welcome talks/posters in any area that is relevant to the development of a textbook, from fundamental content, approaches to developing active learning activities, resources, pitfalls we need to be aware of, design and content of figures, etc. We would also welcome talks about the needs of the international community, industry, or any other interested groups.

Topics will include:

Vision for an open source materials textbook
Best practices for open source material
Needs of the materials community
Working Group Sessions on: Mathematics, Computation, and Data tools for Materials Education Fundamentals: (Bonding, Structure, Defects, Thermodynamics, and Kinetics), Structural Materials, Soft Functional Materials, EMO Functional Materials, and Characterization of Materials
Implementation: Editorial Boards, Data Management and Version Control, Copyright, Figures, Drawings, Photographs, etc.
Resources for an open source text: active learning modules, computational tools, virtual reality tools, individual and teach based problem sets, video, animation, and other resources

Invited Speakers:

Scott Beckman (Washington State University, USA)
Amy Clark (Colorado School of Mines, USA)
Michael Falk (Johns Hopkins University, USA)
Angus Rockett (Colorado School of Mines, USA)
Anton Van Der Ven (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA)
Stan Whittingham (Binghamton University, The State University of New York, USA)