ChemWiki

The ChemWiki is a unique approach toward chemistry education where a textbook environment is constantly being written and re-written partly by students and partly by faculty members resulting in a free General Chemistry textbook to supplant conventional costly paper-based books.

Currently at American universities, chemistry departments require introductory chemistry textbooks at an average cost of $190 per book. When combined with the accompanied study guide ($70), solutions manual ($50), the online student access kit ($48) and individual instructor Readers ($60), the total cost ranges from $250 to $420 annually per student. With an average of ~1,500 students taking General Chemistry sequences each year for a major department, we ask freshmen Chemistry students to contribute from $375k to $525k total annually per university, which essentially doubles to $1M per year when including O-chem classes. While textbooks are clearly an important and critical component to students’ education, their abusive price tags are not, especially in today’s economy as tuition and other student costs are increasing near exponentially.

Much of the content in chemistry textbooks has essentially not changed for years: thermodynamics has been around for centuries; S_N2 reaction basics have been established for decades and even alchemists in the 16th century knew how to titrate properly. Why have we convinced ourselves that shelling out $200 per book for established knowledge is the way to go? Simply because there is no other choice; faculty, not students, determine the required textbooks for classes and for a suitable non-commercial textbook substitute to be viable, it must be off sufficient quality to warrant evaluation AND must be supported especially by faculty.

We are constructing an online freely accessible textbook to address both aspects. However, the construction of a textbook is not a trivial task, requiring years of effort to complete. This cannot be done by one person, hence we are constructing the ChemWiki via a massively parallelized plan involving simultaneous development effort on multiple fronts, whereby content is written and re-written by not only by faculty members, but primarily by students and other contributing experts.

The ChemWiki project is constantly being written and re-written partly by students and partly by faculty members. The success of the ChemWiki hinges on the open access of a flexibly-built, rigorously-vetted online textbook. This aspect and other critical features of the UCD Chemwiki are outlined in our philosophy below. Please contact Dr. Larsen if you desire to be a module designer for the ChemWiki.

Go check for yourself at ChemWiki.ucdavis.edu or check the other "Complete Textbooks" under construction: PhysWiki, BioWiki, MathWiki, StatWiki, GeoWiki

• CCCE Newsletter > The Dynamic Open-Access ChemWiki HyperTextbook: Realizing the Next Stage in Textbook Evolution
• ChemWiki, Open-licensed Science Textbooks, Selected as Featured Book by College Open Textbooks
• The PhysWiki Dynamic Textbook Project