Three teams in NASA's Science Activation (SciAct) program — the NASA Community College Network (NCCN, led by the SETI Institute), Infiniscope (led by Arizona State University) and NASA Treks — joined five community college instructors for a virtual workshop in June 2026. According to the NASA Science report published Aug. 10, 2026, the group aimed to combine active-learning components from NASA education and visualization resources with the OpenStax Astronomy 101 textbook while preserving its core content and explanatory narrative.

Over the following two weeks, each instructor adopted one of the textbook's first five chapters and added active-learning modules, emphasizing materials from SciAct projects such as NASA Treks, Universe of Learning and Cosmic Data Stories. Results were presented in a July wrap-up, and the material was planned for field testing in community college classrooms in Fall 2026.

The report described the workshop as a proof of concept for adapting an existing textbook into an active-learning tool. Next steps were said to include expanding the program and systematically reworking the entire book. The instructors named were Carver Bierson, Dan Chase, Dennis Just, Steve Tuckey and Sally Watt.