UTMOST: Undergraduate Teaching in Mathematics with Open Software and Textbooks

In this collaborative project between the American Institute of Mathematics, Stephen F. Austin State University, the University of Colorado Boulder, and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor we seek to lay the groundwork for understanding the affordances and challenges of developing and using open source learning platforms in the teaching and learning of undergraduate mathematics. We want to investigate two questions: How do students and instructors use textbooks? and How can we develop textbooks that will improve teaching and learning? The outcomes of this project will be a set of instruments for data collection that will be used in a larger study that will also investigate correlations between resource use and student learning. This qualitative study involves 16 instructors and their students, in a diverse sample of institutions across the United States, focusing on two courses, Linear Algebra and Abstract Algebra, that use dynamic, open source textbooks. The study will also collect data on uses of identical PDF versions of the textbooks.