Incoming links: CC BY
In this section we list charitable organizations that support education or research:
- elifesciences.org/labs by eLife
- www.digital-science.com/investment/catalyst-grant/ by Shuttleworth Foundation.
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLOS
- www.chanzuckerberg.com/ Zuck has already invested in education previously:
- openuk.uk/
- Hmm, some/all of it is a copy of LibreTexts but with URLs shorter than a million characters, e.g.:
- Sir Peter Lampl, Education Endowment Foundation and Sutton Trust
- Jacobs Foundation, by German-Swiss coffee mogul Klaus Johann Jacobs
- joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/what-open-education_en
- www.non-trivial.org/ "Launch Your Own Impactful Project CHOOSE YOUR CAUSE. GET EXPERT GUIDANCE. FIND A SOLUTION AND MAKE IT HAPPEN."
- by United States Government:
- FY 2024 Education Innovation and Research:
- Education Innovation and Research (EIR) Notices Inviting Applications
- oese.ed.gov/offices/office-of-discretionary-grants-support-services/innovation-early-learning/education-innovation-and-research-eir/fy-2024-competition/
- www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/05/06/2024-09797/applications-for-new-awards-education-innovation-and-research-eir-program-early-phase-grants
- FY 2024 Education Innovation and Research:
Follows the "certified teacher only" approach which is in Ciro Santilli's opinion a fatal flaw of most elearning systems out there, OurBigBook.com won't suffer from that!
But that is a very, very good project.
All notes appear to have been extracted from existing notes, as noted on the bottom of each page.
Appears to have mixed licenses. E.g.:
- phys.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/University_Physics/Book%3A_University_Physics_(OpenStax)/Book%3A_University_Physics_III_-_Optics_and_Modern_Physics_(OpenStax)/06%3A_Photons_and_Matter_Waves/6.06%3A_De_Broglies_Matter_Waves is CC BY
- but we had seen another one that was CC BY-NC-SA
- phys.libretexts.org/Courses/University_of_California_Davis/UCD%3A_Physics_9HE_-_Modern_Physics/06%3A_Emission_and_Absorption_of_Photons/6.1%3A_Transitions_Between_Stationary_States CC BY-SA
- chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory_Chemistry/Introductory_Chemistry_(CK-12) uses the custom "CK-12 license" which seems a bit like CC BY-NC-SA
- some don't even have a free license, e.g.: phys.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Quantum_Mechanics/Quantum_Mechanics_(Fowler)/00%3A_Front_Matter/04%3A_Licensing
TODO how does it work exactly? Do they ask for permission from authors in every case, including when the content has open license? Or when it has open license, do they just do it? In some cases, the notes have no license, so they must have asked.
TODO what is the source code that authors write? LaTeX or something else? LaTeX feels extremely likely given that it is what most original materials were already written in.
They are attempting a "model up this entire university" thing: phys.libretexts.org/Courses which is good. E.g. they have a bunch of "quantum mechanics ones under: phys.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Quantum_Mechanics
Appears to be UC Davies-based mostly.
They claim to use this closed source backend: www.nice.com/resources/cxone-expert-knowledge-management? Seriously? For a publicly funded project with low-tech requirements?? It is mind blowing.
Some issues:
- the internal cross references are somewhat broken as of 2022.
- their URLs are HUGE! All components of every ancestor are in it. E.g. check this out: phys.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Quantum_Mechanics/Introductory_Quantum_Mechanics_(Fitzpatrick)/12%3A_Time-Dependent_Perturbation_Theory/12.13%3A_Forbidden_Transitions Insane.
OK let's database it:
TODO vs COCO dataset.
As of v7:
- ~9M images
- 600 object classes
- bounding boxes
- visual relatoinships are really hard: storage.googleapis.com/openimages/web/factsfigures_v7.html#visual-relationships e.g. "person kicking ball": storage.googleapis.com/openimages/web/visualizer/index.html?type=relationships&set=train&c=kick
- google.github.io/localized-narratives/ localized narratives is ludicrous, you can actually hear the (Indian women mostly) annotators describing the image while hovering their mouses to point what they are talking about). They are clearly bored out of their minds the poor people!
These people have good intentions.
The problem is that they don't manage to go critical because there's to way for students to create content, everything is manually curated.
You can't even publicly comment on the textbooks. Or at least Ciro Santilli hasn't found a way to do so. There is just a "submit suggestion" box.
This massive lost opportunity is even shown graphically at: cnx.org/about (archive) where there is a clear separation between:Maybe this wasn't the case in their legacy website, legacy.cnx.org/content?legacy=true, but not sure, and they are retiring that now.
- "authors", who can create content
- "students", who can consume content
Thus, OurBigBook.com. License: CC BY! So we could re-use their stuff!
By Rice University.
TODO what are the books written in?
- github.com/openstax/openstax-cms Uses Wagtail CMS. So presumaby they just Wagtail's WYSIWYG.
- github.com/openstax/os-webview
Some possible/not possible sources that could be used to manually bootstrap content:
- LibreTexts. Good project. "Teacher-only-content" unfortunately as usual. But besides that fundamental flaw, they do exactly what we want to do in a sense.
- OpenStax: CC BY. This could be a great entry point, as they already have some university integration going on, and might be interested in this project.
- physics.stackexchange.com/questions/6157/list-of-freely-available-physics-books "List of freely available physics books" explicitly asks for:but the thread was locked, and basically none of the sources in the answers have free licenses, nor do they note it. It just seems that the physicists don't know what a free license is.
a list of physics books with open-source licenses, like Creative Commons, GPL
- MIT OpenCourseWare: CC BY-NC-SA, so not really usable
- github.com/certik/theoretical-physics: MIT License. Workable but wonky.
- subwiki.org/: wiki with some upper graduate math subjects presumably by this Indian dude: www.linkedin.com/in/vipul-naik-0ab1898/. Description on his homepage: vipulnaik.com/subwiki/. He's also got other interesting but not so relevant projects:He's also into Stack Overflow, Quora and Wikipedia editing. That's a cool dude. He's into in LessWrong it seems.
- pro freer immigration laws: vipulnaik.com/openborders/
- vipulnaik.com/cognito-mentoring/ free mentoring project for interested students
- massive mathematics books
- Infinite Napkin.CC BY-SA mathematics infinite book: github.com/vEnhance/napkin/issues/77. Very similar type of content to what we want in this project!
- Stacks Project
Existing lecture notes by students:
- github.com/mb2g17/NotesNetworkArchive Google Docs-based: docs.google.com/document/d/1OIcQ8dJ_FAhdkirU94M29-ZbNZ4oQs1LbWF3Nz-mq_U/edit#heading=h.vehxib58w1iw. An actual student uploading tons of lecture notes in one coherent system. CC BY-NC-SA unfortunately.
- academia.stackexchange.com/questions/148261/do-you-keep-your-study-notes-publicly-available mentions:Related: academia.stackexchange.com/questions/40381/how-common-is-it-that-professors-have-their-students-write-textbooks
- Cambridge Mathematics Lecture Notes by Dexter Chua (2014-2018)Comments:
Lecture note upload website:
- nexusnotes.com likely illegal reuploads of PDFs from teachers
- www.studocu.com/en-gb Paywall. PDF uploads. Unclear if simple teacher reuploads or actual novel notes.
- www.studydrive.net/
- Chinese GitHub repos. Some of these are very advanced in terms of content quantity and organizational quality! The Chinese are miles ahead in this area:
- github.com/PKUanonym/REKCARC-TSC-UHT Guidance for courses in Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University. Chinese. Appears to try and store all past exams.
- github.com/lib-pku/libpku
- github.com/openwhu/OpenWHU: Wuhan University
- github.com/USTC-Resource/USTC-Course: USTC
- github.com/Zeal-L/UNSW: UNSW from Australia, but by a Chinese dude
- github.com/apachecn/mit-18.06-linalg-notes: translation of MIT course to Chinese
- github.com/chenyang1999/MyComputerCollegeCourses: TODO which univeresity
- github.com/elder-frog/OpenCourseCatalog: nothing to do with this project, but since I'm making a list, this dude is copying YouTube videos to Bilibili. And he's edgy anti-CCP on Twitter, what a legend.
- github.com/TheBloodthirster/BUAA_Course_Sharing: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beihang_University
- github.com/1051727403/SHU-CS-Source-Share: ShangHai University CS course source code
- github.com/Willie169/tw-gifted-k12-notes: Taiwanese high school notes
Exams uploads:
- questions.tripos.org/part-ib/all/ University of Cambridge Mathematics past examinations
This is an interesting initiative which has some similarities to Ciro Santilli's OurBigBook project.
The fatal flaw of the initiative in Ciro Santilli's opinion is the lack of user-generated content. We will never get there without UGC and algorithms, never.
Also as of 2021, it mostly useless business courses: learn.saylor.org unfortunately.
But it has several redeeming factors which Ciro Santilli aproves of:
- exam as a service-like
- they have a GitHub: github.com/saylordotorgo
Licensing appears to be a mixed mess between the dreaded CC BY-NC-SA and the good CC BY, e.g.:?
The founder Michael J. Saylor looks a bit crooked, Rich people who create charitable prizes are often crooked comes to mind. But maybe he's just weird.
Michael Saylor interview by Lex Fridman (2022)
Source. At the timestamp:What statement... maybe he's actually not crooked, maybe it was just an accounting mistake... God, why.
When I go, all my assets will flow into a foundation, and the foundation's mission is to make education free for everybody forever.
If only Ciro Santilli knew how to contact him and convince him that his current approach is innefective and that Ciro has something better! Michael, please Google into this page some day, Ciro Santilli needs funding for OurBigBook.com. A hopeless Tweet at: twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1548350114623660035. Also tried to hit his
saylor@strategy.com.