Full OER textbooks written by CUNY faculty.
A humorous but entirely factual account of American history from the beginning up to the present.
Currently, many academic institutions are using one or more variations of online modalities due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and science educators face a unique challenge with distance-learning laboratories. Many resources to engage students in virtual, interactive laboratory activities exist, but we found that high costs and/or overlooked content left gaps for several topics typically taught in a general, introductory biology course for undergraduate biology majors (e.g., organismal biology). Additionally, resources for an online lab must be identified and curated from multiple sources, requiring intense demands on the instructors’ time. To meet this need and to overcome the financial burden of high-cost lab manuals or software, we developed, piloted, and revised a series of online general biology lab exercises. We have published these exercises as an Open Educational Resource (OER) digital laboratory manual under the Creative Commons License Agreement, and they are accessible online via Manifold, Creative Commons, and the CUNY Academic Works portal.
The online geology lab for community college students was developed by Dr. Rondi Davies, a faculty member at Queensborough Community College, City University New York, during two years of forced online synchronous learning brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. This open educational resource collects many of Dr. Davies’ favorite open-access materials and supplements them with her own work within a single, cohesive laboratory manual intended for two-year, non-major college students from the New York area.
Dr. Davies wanted to develop labs that were fun, engaging, and that excited students about the subject, were relevant to their lives, helped them to grow as scientists, and even opened their minds to the possibility of a career in STEM and the geosciences. Strategies adopted to achieve these goals include collecting and interpreting data to simulate the scientific process and develop student confidence and self-efficacy, sketching, role-playing as a scientist, and reasoning by analogy to help students feel appreciated and valued.
To enhance relevance and meaning-making, the labs are grounded in the geologic history of New York. Each lab is structured to meet students at their level of knowledge and build on what they know. They follow a 5E instructional approach (Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, Evaluate; Bybee et al., 2006), which is based in educational theory about how students learn and fosters conceptual change. The labs also use anchoring phenomena and modeling to engage students and show their learning.
Each of the twelve labs was designed to be covered in a three-hour class within a 15-week semester. The introductory lab is about observation and interpretation and how the process of science is much like solving a mystery. Mineral resources, plate tectonics, and igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks provide much of the foundational material. This is followed by more exploratory labs on earthquakes, the glacial and geological history of New York, and climate change. The final lab, an in-person or online field trip guide to the Hall of Planet Earth at the American Museum of Natural History, draws on all the topics covered in previous labs.
Each lab is accompanied by a Teacher’s Guide and an online answer sheet (formatted for the Blackboard learning management system). A multiple-choice format is used for many questions, making the labs easy to grade.
The materials were developed, tested, and refined over two years of synchronous remote learning between 2019 and 2021. Although developed for online learning, they can easily be utilized for in-person classes.
An OER resource for Hum1: Modern Humanities: Arts & Ideas
Humanities Course Description: Through the exploration of modern literature, drama, art, film, poetry, and music, this course places developments in the Humanities into historical and philosophical contexts and illustrates the continuity of culture. This course introduces students to literature, philosophy, art, film, and music from the beginning of the 20th century to the present.
Humanities Course Objectives: At the completion of this course, students will be able to
1. become acquainted with the human tradition as expressed in its literature, philosophy, and the arts;
2. become familiar with seminal modern ideas and theories as expressed through literature, philosophy, and the arts;
3. examine underlying assumptions about and ways of seeing literature, philosophy, and the arts;
4. think critically about the humanities by looking outward at the world and formulating thoughtful and informed ideas about it; and
5. understand themselves as persons whose identities are shaped through participation in a wider community and longer history.
Introduction to Sociology textbook from Kingsborough Community College
Welcome to the “Introduction to Computers and Programming using Python: A Project-based Approach”. This book is designed to teach basic programming skills to students who are new to the field of computing using a project-based learning approach. It has been designed to give freedom to the instructor, both in format and topics ultimately used throughout the course. While we provide 13 turnkey projects, it is only expected that 3 or 4 are used over the course of a semester, and all projects are provided both as textual instructions (the student version of this OER) and Jupyter Notebooks (one with and one without the solutions). It is up to the instructor to choose the most efficient platform according to the context of the class and technical constraints. Not all projects are created equal: they all assume some degree of proficiency in certain aspects of programming and provide practice in other aspects. For Instructor’s Version, please contact editor of the book Mathieu Sassolas at MSassolas@qcc.cuny.edu
The first objective of this book is to define and discuss the meaning of truth in mathematics. We explore logics, both propositional and first-order , and the construction of proofs, both formally and human-targeted. Using the proof tools, this book then explores some very fundamental definitions of mathematics through set theory. This theory is then put in practice in several applications. The particular (but quite widespread) case of equivalence and order relations is studied with detail. Then we introduces sequences and proofs by induction, followed by number theory. Finally, a small introduction to combinatorics is given.
This tutorial was created to accompany the GIS Practicum, a day-long workshop offered by the Newman Library at Baruch College CUNY that introduces participants to geographic information systems (GIS) using the open source software QGIS. The practicum introduces GIS as a concept for envisioning information and as a tool for conducting geographic analyses and creating maps. Participants learn how to navigate a GIS interface, how to prepare layers and conduct a basic geographic analysis, and how to create thematic maps. This tutorial was written using QGIS version 1.5 "Tethys", a cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) desktop GIS software package.
This tutorial was created to accompany the GIS Practicum, a day-long workshop offered by the Newman Library at Baruch College CUNY that introduces participants to geographic information systems (GIS) using the open source software QGIS. The practicum introduces GIS as a concept for envisioning information and as a tool for conducting geographic analyses and creating maps. Participants learn how to navigate a GIS interface, how to prepare layers and conduct a basic geographic analysis, and how to create thematic maps. This tutorial was written using QGIS version 1.8 "Lisboa", a cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) desktop GIS software package.
This tutorial was created to accompany the GIS Practicum, a day-long workshop offered by the Newman Library at Baruch College CUNY that introduces participants to geographic information systems (GIS) using the open source software QGIS. The practicum introduces GIS as a concept for envisioning information and as a tool for conducting geographic analyses and creating maps. Participants learn how to navigate a GIS interface, how to prepare layers and conduct a basic geographic analysis, and how to create thematic maps. This tutorial was written using QGIS version 2.14 "Essen", a cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) desktop GIS software package.
This tutorial was created to accompany the GIS Practicum, a day-long workshop offered by the Newman Library at Baruch College CUNY that introduces participants to geographic information systems (GIS) using the open source software QGIS. The practicum introduces GIS as a concept for envisioning information and as a tool for conducting geographic analyses and creating maps. Participants learn how to navigate a GIS interface, how to prepare layers and conduct a basic geographic analysis, and how to create thematic maps. This tutorial was written using QGIS version 2.18 "Las Palmas", a cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) desktop GIS software package.
This OER is intended as a textbook for a one semester introductory course in Human Anatomy and Physiology for non-science majors. It covers the major topics typically covered in A&P, but in a simplified, easier to understand manner. This textbook aims to educate students interested in lower-level health careers and non-science majors without the intimidating detail found in current textbooks. Text and images were created to be more accessible for these student populations.
This OER is intended as a textbook for a one semester introductory course in Human Anatomy and Physiology for non-science majors. It covers the major topics typically covered in A&P, but in a simplified, easier to understand manner. This textbook aims to educate students interested in lower-level health careers and non-science majors without the intimidating detail found in current textbooks. Text and images were created to be more accessible for these student populations.
Introduction to Psychology is a modified version of Psychology 2e - OpenStax.
This OER textbook provides students with a brief introduction to: the definition and history of sociology; sociological research methods; the sociological paradigms; the sociological imagination; culture and socialization; social structure; social stratification; and social inequality. It was created through the integration of various OER texts, including OpenStax, Sociology Wikibooks, and more. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 license.
This book is intended to be used together with a presentation or other supportive material. Maps, pieces of art and archaeological evidence have to be presented so that the past can be recreated in context. The individual lecturer and reader need to fill in the missing parts they want to focus on, based on their expertise and interest. This guide is kept short and simple on purpose; textbooks on ancient civilizations are often expensive and only used periodically throughout the semester. Hopefully this little guide will be of use for beginning students of ancient Greek history
This is an OER textbook on linear algebra.
This is an OER textbook on linear algebra.