Open Education

ntroduction to Art: Design, Context, and Meaning offers a comprehensive introduction to the world of Art. Authored by four USG faculty members with advance degrees in the arts, this textbook offers up-to-date original scholarship. It includes over 400 high-quality images illustrating the history of art, its technical applications, and its many uses. Combining the best elements of both a traditional textbook and a reader, it introduces such issues in art as its meaning and purpose; its structure, material, and form; and its diverse effects on our lives. Its digital nature allows students to follow links to applicable sources and videos, expanding the students’ educational experiences beyond the textbook. Introduction to Art: Design, Context, and Meaning provides a new and free alternative to traditional textbooks, making it an invaluable resource in our modern age of technology and advancement.

This text is primarily designed to serve as a textbook for a college-level music theory fundamentals course. However, it also has the flexibility to serve equally well for a typical core curriculum college-level Music Theory I or Harmony I course. Our goal is to deliver sufficient information to enable the student to be able to evaluate and analyze select music from the literature as quickly as is practical. Secondly, we seek to provide sufficient instruction to enable a student to begin writing music as quickly as is practical. In order to develop a complete argument, it is important that the student understand that this text “assumes a blank slate.” No prior knowledge on the part of the student is assumed.

David Berger, Chuck Israels
The Public Domain Song Anthology by David Berger and Chuck Israels is a collection of 348 popular songs with modern and traditional harmonization for both study and performance. This open educational resource was curated by two leading jazz repertory experts and consists of songs in the US public domain. This anthology is the first of its kind and is free for students and performers to use, adapt, remix, and share. The songs, many of which are at risk of being forgotten, are free of copyright restrictions and are available in multiple formats to promote greater usage and dissemination.

Accessible, relevant, real-world economics teaching, available and free to everyone.

Interactive resource created by BYU business professor, Dr. Kurt Sandholtz.

Innovative Lessons Plans for Active Learning: Teaching Research and Evidence-Based Practice is a resource in research and evidence-based practice for active learning in the undergraduate nursing classroom. It is meant to supplement any nursing research text. Designed to provide educators with creative teaching ideas, this text includes a variety of lessons on nursing research topics. Topics include bias, measurement, sampling, theory and more. Lessons provide active learning for in-class, hybrid, and online formats. Each lesson includes objectives, overview, and detailed steps. As an open access resource, the text is continuously in-process. Designed to be independent of any published text, the book compliments any nursing research and evidence-based course. This text is also a suitable resource for introductory research in other disciplines.

Nursing Care at the End of Life: What Every Clinician Should Know should be an essential component of the basic educational preparation for the professional registered nurse student.

An innovative online open American history textbook. The editors state, "The American Yawp constructs a coherent and accessible narrative from all the best of recent historical scholarship. Without losing sight of politics and power, it incorporates transnational perspectives, integrates diverse voices, recovers narratives of resistance, and explores the complex process of cultural creation. It looks for America in crowded slave cabins, bustling markets, congested tenements, and marbled halls. It navigates between maternity wards, prisons, streets, bars, and boardrooms. Whitman’s America, like ours, cut across the narrow boundaries that strangle many narratives. Balancing academic rigor with popular readability, The American Yawp offers a multi-layered, democratic alternative to the American past."

This textbook guides a learner who has no previous German experience to gain the ability to accurately understand formal written German prose, aided only by a comprehensive dictionary.

World History: Cultures, States, and Societies to 1500 offers a comprehensive introduction to the history of humankind from prehistory to 1500. Authored by six USG faculty members with advance degrees in History, this textbook offers up-to-date original scholarship. It covers such cultures, states, and societies as Ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient Israel, Dynastic Egypt, India’s Classical Age, the Dynasties of China, Archaic Greece, the Roman Empire, Islam, Medieval Africa, the Americas, and the Khanates of Central Asia. It includes 350 high-quality images and maps, chronologies, and learning questions to help guide student learning. Its digital nature allows students to follow links to applicable sources and videos, expanding their educational experience beyond the textbook. It provides a new and free alternative to traditional textbooks, making World History an invaluable resource in our modern age of technology and advancement.

MyOpenMath is designed for mathematics, providing delivery of homework, quizzes, and tests with rich mathematical content. Students can receive immediate feedback on algorithmically generated questions with numerical or algebraic expression answers. And it can do so much more, providing a full course management system, including file posting, discussion forums, and a full gradebook, all designed with mathematics in mind.

The mission of OpenIntro is to make educational products that are free, transparent, and lower barriers to education. Features three textbooks. All are free to download, all are available in print, and all offer supporting teaching tools.

WeBWorK is an open-source online homework system for math and sciences courses. WeBWorK is supported by the MAA and the NSF and comes with a National Problem Library (NPL) of over 20,000 homework problems. Problems in the NPL target most lower division undergraduate math courses and some advanced courses. Supported courses include college algebra, discrete mathematics, probability and statistics, single and multivariable calculus, differential equations, linear algebra and complex analysis.

Covers the basics of high performance computing. Audience: new programmers and scientists.

The teaching of histology increasingly relies on digital resources in lieu of traditional microscope laboratories. Digital Histology provides an open educational resource that combines a digital atlas with extensive descriptive text. It is organized as a multi-hierarchy outline that reinforces broader histological concepts and parallels the content of most histology textbooks. Digital Histology, featuring on-demand labeling of structures and interactive quizzes with formative feedback, can be used by a diverse group of learners.

Financial Strategy for Public Managers is a new generation textbook for financial management in the public sector. It offers a thorough, applied, and concise introduction to the essential financial concepts and analytical tools that today’s effective public servants need to know.

Counseling