Biology

Reviewed by Jonathan Karpel, Associate Professor, Southern Utah U on 8/2/18

Comprehensiveness rating: 5

Yes, this text is much like any of the regular, paper general biology textbooks. It covers all the topics in sufficient detail for the student to succeed. I don’t see any glaring errors in terms of subjects that are missing from the text. The order of presentation is basically the same as any other textbook.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

As far as I can discern, the information looks accurate and does not favor one pedagogy over another. I looked over the major sections that I regularly teach (chapters 1-16) and I didn’t run into any inaccurate information.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

This textbook is almost exactly like any paper textbook. So it will remain relevant for the long term, as general biology subjects do not change very much anymore.

Clarity rating: 4

This textbook reads much like any other textbook. I don’t think this type of writing will attract any students to this type of text over a paper textbook. So if you are not trying to differentiate yourself from any of the other general biology textbooks, then the writing in this website doesn’t really make a difference in the selection of a textbook. The writing is not hard to understand and students can quickly search for terms to help them find information.

Consistency rating: 5

I think the layout is consistent within this text. I like how vocabulary words are in bold as this makes it easy for students to make flash cards. The overall framework makes it easy for students to find what they are looking for and they are not constantly adapting to a changing layout.

Modularity rating: 5

The modularity of this textbook is excellent. The contents on the left side of the page make navigation very easy and you can easily switch to different sections to find the information that you need. This is very helpful from a student’s point-of-view, as they can try to find the pertinent information for whatever question they are trying to answer. For a professor, it is easy to point to a chapter and section to provide guidance on where students should focus their studies.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 4

This book is laid out just like the other major paper textbooks, like Campbell and Raven textbooks. It presents the same problems if one wishes to teach topics out of order, which is that the student will have to pay attention to the section they are currently teaching on as not all professors go in chapter order.

Interface rating: 3

I didn’t encounter any problems navigating through the pages. It was easy to navigate the contents list, and very easy to switch from one section to another. It was also easy to search the whole document for terms of interest. One thing that was kind of annoying is that you encounter hyperlinks for “figure” and you click it and it really doesn’t do much. You might want to consider having the figure become larger in a popup or opening a new window. Not sure this is a major hang up, just something I noticed.
I also do not like being required to download some videos through links, but would rather watch the video within the website.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

The text that I perused did not contain any grammatical errors. I like the way the text is easy to read, it seems different than the worst textbooks.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

The nice thing about biology is that it is accessible to most everybody who is interested in learning. I didn't find anything in the text that would turn off a particular ethnicity or other background.

This is a nice replacement for a standard paper textbook. It doesn't really provide much differentiation from paper products other then the fact that it is free. So this can easily be used for this purpose.