Stephen Downes

Not long after the initial popularity of ChatGPT David Wiley argued that the new form of open educational resources would be found in the form of 'open prompts'. This new open access book (391 page PDF) feels like the implementation of that idea. The fourteen chapters each take an 'evidence-based' learning theory or pedagogical strategy, ranging from 'think-pair-share' to Gagne's 'nine events' to 'science of learning'. They outline the strategy, develop a set of prompts that implement the strategy, test the prompts, and report the outcome. The papers are very lightly edited (if at all) and there's a lot of variability in length and quality, though I wouldn't describe any of them as bad. A little more care in presentation would have helped a lot (things like numbering the chapters, sizing the images properly, nicer heading font selection, etc (though these may be limitations of the PressBooks format). Also, there's no mention anywhere of newer developments in the field, like agents (except for a mention in the section on Bloom's Taxonomy), model context protocol (MCP) and the other tools AI models can access.