Note on Textbook Creation

In 2023, I created an Open Education Resources (OER) textbook for the undergraduate and graduate level Information Systems class that I teach.  I had been using a “mashup” textbook assembled from several existing OER texts but, with the speed of technology advances, the material in these texts has grown stale and outdated.

When a new Artificial Intelligence tool was released to the world in November 2022, dubbed Chat-GPT, I saw that this tool could substantial boost the effort to create and maintain a new textbook. Indeed, using ChatGPT, I was able to produce the IS text in less than a month.   Since then, the textbook has been successfully “field tested” in a number of classes with the material being well received by students.

Using this experience, I have been able to produce this textbook for a new class at NSU.  To my knowledge, no existing OER textbook covers AI and Machine Learning, so I hope this will be a useful addition to the growing body of free resources for students.  I have done my best to provide a comprehensive outline, choose content, and engineer the AI prompts to guide ChatGPT to write a useful and understandable text.  I have also checked and validated the work of ChatGPT to the best of my ability.  I hope to release a preliminary copy of the text for review by my peers in other universities across Oklahoma.

While I invested considerable time and effort in creation of the text, I hesitate to take credit as the author.  Given the growing consensus that AI also cannot “author” original works, this gray area remains perplexing, so for now, I will simply take credit as the Editor.

I am gladly accepting suggestions for improvements from colleagues. Please feel free to email me at wood79@nsuok.edu with any questions or suggestions to improve the book.