This is not an enlightened book, but I have not found it to lack images and examples from across the spectrum of humanity. Art program is adequate but not inspiring. The book is not written in a conversational or condescending voice, a plague among other biology textbooks. Here are a few errors that I noted: The book is nicely comprehensive in its overall selection of units and chaptersall the basic components of any standard semester-long or year-long general biology course for majors or a mixed nonmajors/majors audience. I was wondering if you had any more? In my first year of using this OER, I regret to report that I didnt have time to explore the links embedded in the text. A few are poor. Shhh. However, I now realize that instructors are encouraged to cut irrelevant material and use relevant material to their coursework. The text is well organized and the sections well thought and relevant. The text is relevant, and it should remain so for some time. The textbook is comparable to a general biology textbook for majors from any of the major publishers. This book focuses on proper concepts and details, not extraneous stuff. - The 'Link to Learning' sections should be in a footnote or sidebar as they are distracting in the main body of the text. If you are looking for a reputed brand such as the Atlantis Coffee Vending Machine Noida, you are unlikely to be disappointed. The chemistry of life and macromolecules in biology have to be discussed before gene regulation which itself has to precede the various organ systems. This online textbook covers most chapters for the biology 101 and 102 courses taught at TCC. The textbook is well organized and flows in a logical manner. The text is not culturally insensitive, and material can easily be supplemented with current news articles and essays addressing the moral and ethical implications of current findings and technologies. Here are some examples; Im sure there are many more. With a little work to customize, this is a great alternative to an expensive textbook, and I will continue to use it. The significance of these comparisons is not explained. It will be interesting to try to adapt these sections to a lecture format. The text includes examples of diverse organisms from around the world. I like that the chapters are fairly short. For additional free and open resources, visit http://www.openstax.org/. are not subject to the Creative Commons license and may not be reproduced without the prior and express written Potassium has an atomic number of 19. The reviewers noticed that care was taken to include recent findings (for example, neurogenesis and BrdU labeling; epigenetics; personalized medicine). For example, redox reactions are briefly described, but their value in removing free energy from glucose molecules is given short shrift. That should be fine on a laptop or desktop computer. I have not noticed any grammatical issues but did find some of the sentences to be too long or awkwardly constructed. Furthermore, some of the links that take readers to additional multimedia features do not work. These highlighted boxes standout for the students as something extra and interesting, and the information is not lost in the main text. read more. It covered all of the subject areas that my current General Biology textbook covers. I had no issues browsing and reading the textbook. My attempt to use a QR code scanner app of a mobile phone on the PDF of the textbook on a laptop screen didnt work and clicking the URL indicated the link was no longer current. The information of the text is nicely proportioned into manageable sections with allows the reader to pause and contemplate the material just presented. The authors did well in presenting multiple controversial topics within numerous sections throughout the book. Overall, a timely discussion of modern issues is demonstrated well throughout the text. I advise reviewing and using review questions with caution so that students are not conceptually mislead, or think the questions are isomorphic with your own assessment questions. The free cost to students is the biggest plus and means the book is equally and equitably accessible to all students, and can be easily navigated or downloaded in a variety of formats to suit personal preferences. It is a false savings to provide a free textbook that lacks features that are crucial and necessary to student understanding of what is, frankly, very challenging material. The text integrates in-depth concepts over a broad range of topics. The reviewer has no issues with the grammar used in this textbook. However, some have low resolution, which makes their interpretation difficult. More recent genomic analysis has identified cephalochordates as the most basal chordates. I found no grammatical errors, nor did I find distracting terms. But this is not necessarily a bad thing, as it should make it easy for all instructors (regardless of their teaching style) to make the change and substitute this book for an equivalent print text. (ID: 349a8a47e1d944c18f9bdae4af018fe7) electrophoresis technique used to separate DNA fragments according to size helicase Each chapter has the appropriate figures for enhanced learning and understanding. I checked several other sources just to be sure and can find no confirmation of this claim). The information provided is up to date and comparable to similar texts. You can assign students some chapters and not others. Students can download this text for free, view it on their devices and print it out. The section on the terrestrial biomes discusses only the temperate forests of the eastern part of the U.S. Reviewed by Stan Guffey, Faculty Scholar, University of Tennessee on 6/20/17, Biology (OpenStax) is as comprehensive as, and follows the general topical format of a commercially available introductory biology textbook designed for life science majors. One of the most attractive features of an open source text is that it can be more readily revised that hard copy since it is a web-based text. Should our understanding of cellular respiration or fermentation change, the chapter should be easy to update. Some of these are laced with ads that might indicate endorsement by a school or faculty and could be offensive to a student. I have had no issues with the interface on my computer or phone. However to meet the learning outcomes for each and individual institution extra supplement must be provided. Unless I missed it, the R in Figure 2.27 is undefined. Intermittently, the text refers to itself, which could be an issue if one has not read the previous information, but this is not frequent. Overall, I felt that the authors made wise choices in balancing clarity of illustrations against complexity of an illustration. As far as I can discern, the information looks accurate and does not favor one pedagogy over another. New stomach cells are constantly produced to replace dead ones, which are digested by the stomach acids. Better written than some, but I can tell they haven't spent large sums of money on editing. There are no citations within the text to reference where the facts in the text were researched. Special interest topics also fail to mention Canadian content (for example, laws governing reproductive technologies and designer babies). read more. Professor, Science Dept. Obviously, individual instructors will vary in how much coverage they give to specific topics, but in general, this book matches the level of detail I expect from my students. The comprehensiveness varies but is overall mostly appropriate. Biology 2e works through cellular respiration diligently and thoroughly, making it very useful as a reference text. The external link is no help because it uses a completely different scheme. There are some nuances of classification and speaking in generalities that could lead the learner to think in terms of absolutes where that may not be the case (ie. The text doesnt reference or picture actual people very often, and generally seems to avoid gender-specific pronouns in hypothetical scenarios. The text feels very modular. There seems to be less volume of coverage of Ecology/Evolution compared to Organismal Chapter 9, on signaling, provides a good explanation of the basics of cell-cell communication, a central element of what makes animals different from unicellular eukaryotes. The text is not culturally insensitive or offensive. A glossary of key terms is provided for each chapter. It is good to be able to search the documents easily because they are online. Why should our textbooks ignore it? In some cases, these are not strictly related to biology; for example, quantitative and qualitative are discussed but not defined in Chapter 1. The level of depth of material is consistent enough as well that the information covered is "accurate" to the level required for the text book. The book could definitely be broken up into small sections for lectures, discussions and homework. Each chapter is arranged in smaller, manageable subdivisions. Openstax does have chapter questions available, but I prefer to use reading guides which ask students to read the chapter, pausing to answer questions as they go. Although there were some minor figure errors which I did not find in the traditional textbook, there was effectively no difference in accuracy. I did not stumble over any grammatical errors. Reviewed by Conner Sandefur, Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina Pembroke on 6/19/18, This text covers all subject matter used in a one semester introductory biology course. The text provides students with current, relevant information in a progression of topics and concepts based on empirical data and basic science. It provides a path to cut student cost while still maintaining rigor. My review of the text found no errors and it appeared in every since to follow the standard for a quality general biology text. There are many cases in which the authors refer to plants and animals, rather than including all relevant taxa. An instructor who was teaching with this book would have to be able to create/provide this kind of summary for students on their own or from another source. However, the Art Connection figures, in general, were very low resolution and many appeared blurry and difficult to read. However, it still seems slightly dated even with this consideration. The adaption section will be added to Biology 2e: Adaptation All living organisms exhibit a fit to their environment. I still would not recommend my students this current version as it may not be easy to follow and is at times confusing. I would not suggest adding more subjects and I appreciate the depth of coverage in the text giving the instructor the option to choose which sections to focus on in their courses. The content of the text is generally accurate but not uniformly. In my review, I focused mainly on Units 1 3 (Chemistry, The Cell, and Genetics) as those encompass the topics that I typically address in the first semester of General Bio. Poor use of page space / too much white space also makes this text a poor fit for reading online, particularly on devices such as iPad, tablet, eReaders where screen size is smaller and the text /content is intended to fill the entire screen space. On a more negative note, a reference was made to "hard" and "soft" sciences with biology being called a "hard" or quantitative science which was identified as different from the more qualitative or "soft" social sciences. Everything in those sentences is accurate and easy to comprehend, but what seems lacking to me is an explanation of the relevance of the processes that are being described. Other The text appears to be very comprehensive. Each chapter and subsections within each chapter are set up similarly with chapter glossaries, summaries, and questions occurring at the end of each chapter. The interfaces were either excellent or poor. The underlying theme of evolution is throughout the book and unifies the theme. I think this book has great potential and I really want to adopt this book in order to save students money. Getting students to read textbooks is always a struggle and so I do think that making the layout appear less daunting would be an improvement. However, the blanket statement as written by the authors instead plays to the very common misconception that genes are all-powerful and determine ones fate. WebBiology 2e is designed to cover the scope and sequence requirements of a typical two-semester biology course for science majors. The text is easily divisible into smaller reading sections just by including the link to the text in a syllabus and specifiying which sections need to be read. A person notices that her houseplants that are regularly exposed to music seem to grow more quickly than those in rooms with no music. It would be nice to be able to click on images and have them blown up or popped out, but it is easy enough to zoom in the browser. The book is nicely comprehensive in its overall selection of units and chaptersall the basic components of any standard semester-long or year-long general biology course for majors or a mixed nonmajors/majors audience. First half of the book fits seamlessly with any generalized schedule. Reading guides are combinations of fill-in-the-blank, multiple choice, and labeling. Thus, this textbook is comparable to the majority of its peer traditional books. The small text-box presentations of examples of the scientific method throughout the book were well executed. Chapters that involve complex areas including genetics, physiology, and the immune system could be a bit more user friendly for the population that this text should serve. Biology 2e seems like a great text book for freshman biology majors. I found nothing in this chapter which could be construed as offensive or insensitive. Please check your connection and try again. If you are looking for a majors level textbook that covers all the content covered in the vast majority of first semester biology course, this will work for you. The book followed a typical format of introducing biological concepts starting with cell and ending with community biology. In some cases, the text over-focuses on certain topics while omitting others. Though relevant, it may need revisions to trends in the future. In Section 10.1 (p. 280) on genomic DNA, the text makes a distinction between character and trait (a tricky concept for many students) but then conflates the two on the following page (referring to hair color as a trait instead of a character). These bonds, along with hydrogen bonds, help form the three-dimensional structure of the proteins in our cells that is necessary for their proper function. In fact, interactions between R-groups on amino acids are more important than Van der Waals attractions in stabilizing 3D structure in proteins. The book is organized in a very similar manner to most introductory Biology textbooks - with good reason. I may notice more such problems when I adopt the text for my course. CRISPR-CAS technology is sufficiently explained for an understanding of the concept without going into too much detail. The index is helpful but there is no glossary. 6. I attended Louisiana Tech this summer for BISC 130 132 and the prof used Openstax. The book provides a sound and sufficiently detailed and accurate coverage of general biology and is readable, has appropriate illustrations, comes with questions and has links to supplementary external digital content (but see comment on QR codes and URLs below). In fact, throughout the textbook, bacteria are mentioned in contexts where bacteria and archaea should both be included. If the images were to be integrated more into the text using close wrapping it may improve the accessibility and make the text feel less intimidating. read more. The online accessibility allows one to search the contents of the book, making it Quite an asset! Errors are corrected in the texts online format prior to fall and spring semesters, and the pdf version prior to fall semesters. In the introductory chapters, they are heavily focused on careers relating to health and medicine, but there are a few mentions of professions relating more toward ecology. In fact, not only are there no such problems, but many of the examples used demonstrate a clear commitment to human (and other biological) diversity. The text is lucid and concise in use of language, and overall well written. Rather poor in 7, 12-15 and 17. Interface is overall clearly laid out, but is not particularly engaging visually The language skills needed are consistent throughout the text and the organization of the material is consistent. Diversity of life and physiology get a lot of attention and surprising detail for an introductory textbook. Every summer, a new PDF of Biology is released and print stock is updated for the following Fall. My students who use the PDF and iBook versions report that they like being able to search for topics. While there is far more content than I cover in a 10-week term, the ability to customize this excellent text for specific use is invaluable. Text is well-written and does not seem to be overly technical. 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