zyBooks

The ideals of open access do not exclude the blind and reading-disabled, but the realities of limited funding frequently do. In this work, we survey the 36,000 open-access ebooks and chapters supported by OAPEN to determine the extent of this exclusion and to explore strategies for remediation of poorly accessible ebooks. Only 1144 of these are available in EPUB format, which is more easily used for text-to-speech or braille reading devices than the more common PDF format. Of these 1144 ebooks, we found that only 156 of these contained useful descriptions of images in alt-text attributes. 31% of the images had no descriptions at all, and most of the rest contained single words such as "image" or simply a file name.Rapid advances in machine vision and large language models may provide useful tools towards mitigation of poor ebook accessibility. Our initial experience with these tools suggests that combinations of AI tools together with simple editing and reviewing platforms will provide a cost-effective way forward for the open access community. We are evaluating these tools for automatic description of a set of images and assessing the results. This is a first step to the development of advanced tools to deal with complex tables, graphs and figures which will improve access for all of us, not just the reading disabled.

Programming assignments are key to any computer science course.In today's digital landscape of education, summative assessments, often called labs, are assigned on a weekly basis to students.The goals of these assessments are often to reinforce and to evaluate mastery of the concepts taught in the course.Upon graduation, students are tasked with programming complex projects.A key aspect of a CS student's success in the real world is their ability to develop complex software in professional IDEs (integrated development environments).In this paper we describe a new and powerful labs environment that enables students to master their skills in software development through a cloud-based IDE with support for over 50 programming languages.This labs environment supports an auto-grader and professional unit testing frameworks.Additionally, the labs environment also provides instructors the opportunity to collaborate with students in real-time.We present student usage and behavior data from use of these labs in 300 introductory programming courses across 219 universities.

Abstract Digital textbooks are becoming more common in college-level computer, engineering, and science courses. For various reasons, some students quickly click on reading activities to earn completion points, without earnestly attempting the activities. We analyzed student earnestness in digital computer science and engineering textbooks across a semester. We found that student earnestness declines significantly as the semester progresses. We also found that earnestness levels at a semester's start have a tremendous impact on earnestness throughout the semester, namely that lower average earnestness at a semester's onset leads to a significantly more rapid decline. For example, one course with an initial 90% earnestness score fell to 76% by week 6, whereas another course with an initial 72% score dropped dramatically to just 32% by week 6. This finding emphasizes the importance of instructors ensuring students recognize the utility of the textbook activities from a course's start, and ensure that the activity workload is reasonable too, to start students with high earnestness. We close with recommendations for encouraging earnest completion early in the semester, which is crucial for maintaining earnest completion throughout the course.

Kasula is a Software Engineering Manager for Online Learning Products at MathWorks. Math-Works is the leading developer of mathematical computing software. MATLAB, the language of technical computing, is a programming environment for algorithm development, data analysis, visualization, and numeric computation. Simulink is a graphical environment for simulation and Model-Based Design for multidomain dynamic and embedded systems. Engineers and scientists worldwide rely on these product families to accelerate the pace of discovery, innovation, and development in automotive, aerospace, electronics, financial services, biotech-pharmaceutical, and other industries.

Linear circuit analysis is a foundational course for electrical engineers. Instructors of linear circuit analysis courses have traditionally relied on print textbooks for student learning materials. With the rise of student use of computers and the internet, materials like lecture slides and online videos have also been used for learning materials. Increasingly, traditional textbooks (including online formats) are experiencing a decline, while interactive textbooks are growing in popularity. This paper describes auto-graded learning tools, called challenged activities, from various topics in an online linear circuit analysis textbook. Instructors often assign challenge activities as homework. Each challenge activity has 3-5 levels of increasingly difficult problems. Each level randomly generates a question from a large set of questions of similar difficulty. Students must correctly answer a question in a level to progress to the next level. This paper describes the student usage of 4 challenge activities in an online circuit analysis textbook. The average time spent per activity was under 10 minutes and the vast majority of students who started a level ended up completing that level, indicating little attrition. In fact, most levels had 0% of students give up and the highest was only 8%, which is remarkably low based compared to more traditional paper-and-pencil activities based on the teaching experience of the authors.