In the past few months, more than 30 open textbooks have been peer-reviewed by an outstanding group of professors, instructors, and other experts. Most of these reviewers exceeded our requirement that a reviewer have taught the subject for a minimum of one year at the college level. Many have taught for decades and several have doctorates and full professorships. The reviewers rated every chapter in each book on our 11 criteria and wrote summaries. Some even improved the open textbooks and most made recommendations for improvements. Many put in far more time than we required. One reviewer worked every problem in a difficult textbook.

Behind the scenes Bill Buxton, Jim Huether, Tahiya Marome, Judy Baker, Peter Hartzman, and I coordinated, informed, and worked with the reviewers, calculated the ratings, and converted the reviews to web format.

Now it is your turn. Before we make a big splashy announcement to the world, we need a few volunteers to peruse the reviews and look for inconsistencies among those in a particular discipline. Other recommendations would be welcome. The disciplines include Art, Business, Computer Science, Education, Engineering, English and Composition, Languages and Communications, Literature, Math (including Statistics), and Psychology. Very soon we will add Science and the first two items in this category will be Physics open textbooks. Economics is also expected soon.

We would also like these volunteers to seek out open-licensed photographs to make the per-discipline pages look more attractive on the web.

This work will take 6-8 hours depending on the number of books in the discipline. Like the reviewers, the volunteers need to have experience in teaching the discipline at the college level, preferably at a community college. If you can volunteer for one of these disciplines, please reply to this post. Feel free to post questions.

Many thanks!

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