Resources
The courses are OpenStax books, free to read. Margins follows their chapter order so a term you miss here is easy to find in the book. The full list is on its own page.
OpenStax booksOn this site
Policy
This desk is grateful for access to every book and tool available through OpenStax, by Rice University. The books belong to OpenStax, Rice University. Margins Study Assistant is an independent study tool. It is not published by, endorsed by, or affiliated with OpenStax or Rice University.
Every OpenStax book linked from this desk is licensed CC BY 4.0. You can read those books for free. A link on the books page opens the book page on openstax.org. Keep the OpenStax attribution when you reuse the books themselves.
This app takes no part in an OpenStax process. It does not sell a book, take a donation, download a book file, carry an affiliation link, or run an OpenStax tool. OpenStax is a nonprofit of Rice University. A purchase of a physical copy, a donation, or a download happens on openstax.org, not here. That money goes directly to OpenStax, Rice University. Margins does not take it.
Practice questions, lesson text, chapter summaries, and the Kaleidoscope films are original to this site. They follow the chapter sequence so you can line them up with the book. They are not the OpenStax text.
Key-term definitions differ by book. Most of them are taken from the OpenStax glossary and stay under CC BY 4.0. Definitions for Contemporary Mathematics were written for this guide, in plain language, because those key-term pages name the word and point back to the section.
Scores and lesson progress are saved in this browser only. There is no account. Nothing you answer is sent to a profile, and a different browser or a cleared site storage starts you over. You can clear practice scores on the Practice page and lesson progress on the Lessons page.
Loans, taxes, insurance, drug amounts, and government powers appear because the textbooks teach them. Nothing here is financial, tax, medical, or legal advice. Use the book to learn the idea, and use a qualified person when the decision is a real one.
Site safety
This site does not ask you to sign in, and it has no messages, comments, or file uploads. There is no place where one visitor can contact another.
Fill-in answers are for the practice item in front of you: a number, a term, or a short civic fact. Do not type a password, an identification number, a bank or card number, or anyone’s private information into an answer box. The box is not a form that stores that kind of data on purpose, and it should never receive it.
Links that leave Margins open the OpenStax book in a new tab. OpenStax has its own policies. A chapter link is there so you can read the source next to the summary.
Secured scan
A scan runs in the background each time you open a page. It is the scam check, the hacking check, and the antivirus check for this site. It reads the links, the answer boxes, and the code already on that page. It does not send what you typed anywhere, it does not look at other sites you have open, and it does not scan the files on your computer.
It lets a book link through only when the address is the book page itself on openstax.org. It blocks a link that stops in another folder first, including a different page on that site, and it blocks a link that pretends to be OpenStax. It blocks a box that asks for a password, a card, or a private number. It also blocks a hacking trick in a link or an answer, such as a script, a stolen-cookie string, or a database command, and it blocks a program or a script loaded from outside this site. Practice answers are not that kind of box. You can still open an ordinary outside link after the hold, if you mean to.
Security scan is checking this page.
Kaleidoscope films start when you press play. They are slideshows of shapes, one for each book. They do not collect a name, and they are not a recording of you.
The material is written for an introductory college course. If you are studying on a shared computer, clear the saved scores before you leave. That removes the practice record and the lesson record from that browser.