About Ximera

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What is Ximera? What is it supposed to do? Who is it for?

Ximera, pronounced “chimera,” (Ximera: Interactive, Mathematics, Education, Resources, for All) is an open-source platform that provides tools for authoring and publishing (PDF and Online), open-source, interactive educational content, such as textbooks, problem sets, reviews, and online courses. Ximera uses LaTeX as the authoring source, hence no additional programming skills are required.

Authors write and store their content on their own machines and GitHub repositories. Authors own their content and decide how to license their content. From a single source written in LaTeX, Ximera generates various output: PDF worksheets, PDF textbooks, and PDF solution manuals, and so on. Of most interest, Ximera can also create online interactive activities:

The same source code used to create PDFs also produces interactive online activities when deployed to a Ximera server. Students access this content via a URL or an assignment in their LMS.

Students interact with the content produced within Ximera, hence their experience is highly dependent on the quality of this content. Research shows that students find Ximera materials to be more readable than traditional course materials and perform equivalently to those using proprietary textbooks and online homework systems. While students typically encounter Ximera through their courses, many discover it via web-search and use the platform as independent learners. In 2024, Ximera servers had over one million unique visitors. Since Ximera materials are free, they are accessible to anyone, regardless of enrollment in official courses.

Funding for the Ximera Project is provided by a U.S. Department of Education Open Textbooks Pilot Program grant in the amount of $2,125,000, from 2024–2026, with no external funding. In the past, the Ximera Project has also received support from NSF Grant DUE-1245433, the Shuttleworth Foundation, the Ohio State University Department of Mathematics, and the Affordable Learning Exchange at Ohio State.

As a token of our appreciation, consider applying for a Ximera Flash-Grant Stipend:

https://go.osu.edu/ximera-flash-grant

The most recent version of the Ximera manual can be found in more accessible online interactive format at:

https://go.osu.edu/xman

We encourage all users to check it out!

The authors listed on the cover are the current Ximera lead developers:

Bart Snapp: (Project Manager and LaTeX Development)
Jim Fowler: (Frontend/Backend Development)
Jason Nowell: (Answer-type/LaTeX Development)
Wim Obbels: (DevOps: Frontend/LaTeX/Deployment Development)
Jeff Kuan: (Accessibility Specialist)

In reality, this document has many authors as it is part of an evolution of Ximera documentation. Rodney Austin, Marcus Bishop, Oscar Levin, Matt Thomas, and Hans Parshall authored parts of either the document class or original documentation. Also, special thanks to Claire Merriman and Jenny Sheldon for suggestions and edits.