Work Involves Open Textbook for Data Science

Dr. Nouhad Rizk, instructional associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Computer Science, is a recipient of a $1,500 grant from UH’s Alternative Textbook Incentive Program (ATIP). This is Rizk’s second consecutive year to be selected for the program grant.

Recognizing that the cost of textbooks is a significant burden to the success of students, UH Libraries, in collaboration with the UH Office of the Provost, created the ATIP. The program encourages faculty to adopt open educational resources in their courses by incorporating teaching and learning resources found in the public domain or by using resources that have been licensed in such a way that anyone can freely use and re-purpose them. These resources can be a myriad of media and materials, including full courses, textbooks, streamed videos, and other tools.

At UH, open educational resources have been estimated to save students over $900,000 during academic years 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 – just two years since the start of ATIP.

Rizk was selected for her proposal to create an open textbook, Building Skills for Data Science.

“Data Science has been around forever under different labels – from Data Mining, to Data Analytics and Statistics,” Rizk explains. “Now it’s a buzz name – Data Science. The purpose of the book is to consolidate everything instead of asking students to read chapter 2, 3, 5 from the Statistics textbook, and chapter 6 and 7 from the Data Mining textbook, for example.”

Rizk started planning the open textbook in fall 2018 and anticipates completion in spring 2020. She is also creating a supplementary programming website to access all the programs and coding involved with the textbook.

Learn more about Open Educational Resources at UH.

- Quentisha Puryear, Department of Computer Science