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The PROSE Consortium brings together the ecosystem of various open-source products and communities serving STEM education research and practice in North America, joined by their common mission: to equip STEM teachers with open-source content, tools and strategies that provide engaging, accessible, and effective learning experiences for their students.

The PROSE Consortium welcomes any person or organization committed to five guiding principles:

  1. We exist to enable
    • Students to learn more successfully.
    • Teachers to instruct more effectively.
    • Authors to write more productive and more accessible materials.
    • Researchers to develop more powerful tools and pedagogies.
  2. We are committed to ensuring access to the best open-source learning environments for all of our stakeholders, but especially for the students who need it the most.
  3. We embrace the open web and open standards.
  4. We collaborate on a flexible platform that incorporates new innovations.
  5. We welcome, recognize, and celebrate all users, contributors, and their innovations that move our ecosystem forward.

The PROSE Consortium is an initiative of Runestone Academy, Ltd, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.

NSF Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems

We are grateful for the support of the National Science Foundation, through its Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems program.

Our Phase I activities are currently scoping the development of our Open-Source Ecosystem (OSE) to maximize our impact supporting the authoring and publishing of accessible Open Educational Resources in STEM. Through a series of virtual and in-person roundtable discussions, office hours, and workshops, we are engaging students, instructors, authors, researchers, and developers using these products as we develop a vision and strategic plan for our OSE.

What are PROSE Ecosystem Products?

PreTeXt

PreTeXt is an open-source language that allows STEM textbook authors to describe their content in a single source. This content can include words, images, embeddable videos, applets, and much more. Its open-source software is able to convert this single source into a printable PDF, accessible and interactive HTML, tactile braille code, and more formats. These documents can then be deployed to any freely-available static web host, with GitHub Pages support built-in.

Runestone

Runestone is a Learning Engineering Analytics Portal (LEAP) built with open-source software that enhances PreTeXt-authored HTML, providing an all-inclusive solution for managing a course. Students and instructors are able to log into Runestone-hosted textbooks, allowing instructors to assign content from the book for students to complete online. Going beyond a traditional learning management system, Runestone applies evidence-based principles and methods from educational technology and the learning sciences to create engaging and effective learning experiences, reducing students’ difficulties and challenges as they learn. Runestone’s deep analytics not only help students and instructors optimize learning, but also support authors and researchers that want to study how books are being used, and evaluate interactive pedagogical features of online books that improve student learning.

WeBWorK

WeBWorK is an open-source online homework system for STEM courses. WeBWorK has been supported by the MAA and the NSF and comes with a Open Problem Library (OPL) of over 35,000 homework problems. Formed in 2018, The WeBWorK Project (TWP) is a non-profit organization that coordinates a large volunteer community that supports the WeBWorK open-source software. Members of TWP contribute new questions and features to WeBWorK, curate the open problem library, respond to help requests on the forum, and communicate WeBWorK advancements and research at conferences and in university settings. WeBWorK hosting is a service of Runestone Academy, and WeBWorK exercises are easily integrated into any PreTeXt book.

Doenet

Doenet is an open data-driven educational technology platform designed to measure and share student interactions with web pages. It includes tools for authoring interactive educational content, including its PreTeXt-inspired DoenetML markup language, and conducting educational research using the content. Its ultimate goal is to provide research-based tools to help instructors and learners discover the most effective content.

And yours?

If you are a project leader working on an open-source product dedicated to empowering STEM teachers with the technology they need to educate students for success in the 21st century, reach out to any of our PROSE Advisory Council Members for more information!

Connect with us

The best way to connect with us is to join our

PROSE Consortium Discord server

or join a

community Zoom drop-in.

You can also connect directly with specific communities affiliated with our consortium:

PROSE Advisory Council Members

The PROSE Consortium is guided by an Advisory Council of eight leaders from our ecosystem.

Upcoming Events

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NSF logo The PROSE Consortium is supported by NSF Award #2230153. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) educational materials that are open-sourced and made freely available to learners and educators, known as Open Educational Resources (OER), require an infrastructure that exceeds the quality of commercial alternatives. This project scopes the creation of an Open-Source Ecosystem (OSE) consisting of two existing open-source products: PreTeXt for authoring scholarly documents and textbooks suitable for all areas of STEM, and the Runestone learning engineering and analytics portal for publishing OER textbooks that support both instruction and education research in K-12 and higher education. The long-term societal impacts of this OSE are open-source textbooks that are made freely available to the nation’s STEM classrooms and students through the Open-Source Ecosystem’s support of instructors, authors, and researchers. Furthermore, the OER has the potential to reflect cutting-edge advancements in STEM education research by removing the barriers between researchers, authors, instructors, and students. PreTeXt-authored works can be converted into HTML, print, and braille formats, enabling the resulting Open Educational Resources to be accessible to a wide range of learners at no cost, an equitable approach to ensuring that all students have the same access to education.