Funding and Credit
Authored by Alexa Alice Joubin, this open education resource project is funded by the Washington Research Library Consortium, George Washington University Libraries and Academic Innovation, Public Interest Technology Scholars Program, Trustworthy AI, and Digital Humanities Institute.
This open-access textbook is written by Alexa Alice Joubin, based on her peer-reviewed research, and co-designed by Professor Joubin, Akhilesh Ghanshyambhai Rangani (Master of Science in Computer Science) and Max Turer (GW front-end web developer).
Akhilesh Rangani (Computer Science) has played a pivotal role in developing a bespoke generative AI model, AI voice reader, responsive design, graphic design, as well as back-end and front-end web development. He has previously used the Flutter framework, Dart, and speech recognition technologies to develop an AI voice assistant phone app with a user-friendly interface. For the AI Tutor on this website, Akhilesh used JavaScript and Next.js framework and trained the model on a pre-defined dataset that contains the content of this online textbook.
Misty Trunnell (Research Services Librarian), Dr. David Ettinger (International Affairs Librarian), and Dr. Bo Yang (Instructional Designer) have provided guidance on open licenses and open education resources. Valerie Fliss (Resource Sharing Specialist) assisted in identifying permalinks and open-access versions for further readings.
Ananya Lal has conducted beta-tests on AI features and the site’s content.
This web-based textbook project is supported financially directly by Open@WRLC (a Washington Research Library Consortium initiative), Elliott School of International Affairs Undergraduate Research Assistant Award for “Trustworthy AI and Higher Education,” the George Washington University Public Interest Technology Scholar fellowship (2024-26) and Adapting Course Materials for Equity Faculty Grant (2024).
It has been supported indirectly by the Online Course Development grants in 2021 and 2023, GW Digital Humanities Institute, Trustworthy AI Initiative, the NSF Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society (TRAILS), and GW Coders.
This textbook has been peer reviewed by university professors in the fields. Special thanks go to Professor James Dunnigan, member of the Artificial Intelligence Learning Futures Collaborative at Arizona State University; Professor Sid Monroe Williams, Assistant Professor of Theatre, and Professor Kylie Quave, Assistant Professor of Writing and Anthropology, at George Washington University.
These grants and teams enabled Professor Joubin to create this AI-powered, openly licensed, open-access, online textbook with interactive learning modules.