OpenStax College, an initiative of Rice University, has announced a two-year, $9 million grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation to create and enhance electronic textbooks for the K-12 space.

Employing technology similar to what Google, Amazon, and Netflix use to deliver personalized search, retail, and entertainment options, educators will be able to pinpoint areas where students need assistance and deliver specific content designed to reinforce concepts in those areas. With the grant, OpenStax will create fully personalized proof-of-concept textbooks for Advanced Placement biology and high school physics.

"We can improve outcomes in a number of ways," said OpenStax founder Richard Baraniuk, the Victor E. Cameron professor of engineering at Rice. "We can help teachers and administrators by tapping into metrics that they already collect — like which kind of homework and test questions a student tends to get correct or incorrect — as well as things that only the book would notice — like which examples a student clicks on, how long she stays on a particular illustration or which sections she goes back to reread."