Building custom textbooks for atmospheric science, climate science and meteorology

LibreTexts is a collaboration of faculty building open textbooks, online assessment tools and a rich variety of materials appropriate for their courses and their students. Textbooks can be built de novo, from open resources or by rapidly combining pages and chapters from other Libretexts books across STEM fields. For example a book for a meteorology course can include python programming lessons and via Jupyter hubs integrate program execution into the online book. There is no charge for instructors to build their books and make them accessible online, nor is there a charge for students to use them. Printed copies are available at cost. The LibreTexts project has an online assessment system that integrates the use of cell phones as clickers. Although the discussion of open educational resources (OER) is often dominated by cost saving to students, the real strength is its versatility, the ability to break free of the table of contents straight jacket, the ability to bring in new educational tools and the ability to change on the fly, adapting to our students' needs. As an example, almost all textbooks were machine translated into Spanish, and the number of users grew to over half a million per week in six months. Overall, since inception in 2008, LibreTexts has accumulated over a billion page views with about 40% originating in the US. It is a platform with international reach.The LibreTexts library is both horizontally (across multiple fields) and vertically (across multiple levels of complexity) integrated within a network that provides, not just single textbooks, but an infinitely matrix of pages from which interconnected textbooks can be built. Grounded in social constructivism, the Libretexts project allows teachers and learners to cooperatively construct and organize knowledge. Because of its flexible and modular-based approach to instruction, LibreTexts provides an important alternative to the “one-size-fits-all” approach to instruction where content is presented in a static prepackaged manner. Common formatting of all pages allows addition of services across the libraries including learning analytics, accessibility checking and automatic curation. Further information can be found at https://libretexts.org/, https://commons.libretexts.org/ and the LibreTexts YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@LibreTexts. We seek colleagues to join our project.