| Scope |
The materials community is one of the few in science that does not have an open access textbook for the introduction of our discipline. This symposium is focused on addressing this need and developing an efficient and continuing process to create a high quality open source electronic textbook that will be vetted by our society along with the other materials societies such as TMS, ACeRs, and ASM. We are planning on inviting top practitioners as well as emerging, young researchers in each of the foundational areas of materials science and engineering.
The main outcomes of this symposium will be to identify small editorial boards for each area and to develop a plan to write the first set of chapters. A proposal will be submitted (and hopefully funded before the symposium happens) to NSF to cover the costs of a server based publishing platform and provide funding for the authors of these first chapters. These chapters will continue to be updated and expanded as time goes on. An instructor will be able to choose the sections they want and produce a pdf for their students at no cost.
The goal of this symposium is to work towards developing a sophomore level text that covers the fundamental topics that apply to all areas of materials essential to an introductory text. We expect experienced materials educators to set the scope and depth of the material in each area during their talks and then to identify early career materials scientists and engineers to lead the effort for writing and editing the text, examples, worked problems, and other digital content for each topical area. The plan is to not only provide excellent up to date content, but also provide a prestigious platform for early career materials scientists and engineers to build a strong reputation in their fields. We expect that these efforts will be very valued by academic institutions for tenure and promotion decisions as well as advancement at national labs and industry. Furthermore, we expect to have wide participation across all of the materials societies and include broad international participation in this effort.
We welcome talks in any area that is relevant to the development of a textbook, from fundamental content, approaches to developing active learning activities, pitfalls we need to be aware of, design and content of figures, etc.
Topical areas will include:
- Vision for an open source textbook
- Fundamental Focus Areas: Basic Mathematical Concepts essential to MSE, Bonding ,Structure, Defects, Thermodynamics in the context of phase diagrams, Kinetics of mass transport and nucleation theory, Mechanical properties, Electrical properties, Optical properties, Magnetic
properties, and Characterization.
- Implementation: Copyright, Figures and Captions, Editorial Boards, Data Management and Version Control.
- Video and Animation Resources
- Building Problem Sets and Solutions
- Developing Active Learning Activities |