New and Noteworthy is the City Tech Library O.E.R. Team’s bi-weekly roundup of new and noteworthy O.E.R. We try to include at least one O.E.R. relevant to each school at City Tech in every post. At the end of the month, these resources will be compiled and distributed by the library liaison for your department. Please contact us if you know of new or particularly interesting O.E.R. to share with our colleagues or would like more information about O.E.R. initiatives at City Tech.
Open Education
- Accessibility Toolkit – 2nd Edition, by Amanda Coolidge; Sue Doner; Tara Robertson; and Josie Gray, BCcampus (2018). License: CC BY
“The goal of the Accessibility Toolkit – 2nd Edition is to provide resources for each content creator, instructional designer, educational technologist, librarian, administrator, and teaching assistant to create a truly open textbook—one that is free and accessible for all students. This is a collaboration between BCcampus, Camosun College, and CAPER-BC.”
- Adaptation Guide: A reference to adapting or revising an open textbook, by Lauri M. Aesoph, BCcampus (2016). License: CC BY
“The Adaptation Guide is a practical reference about how to customize — or adapt — an open textbook so that it better fits your needs in the classroom and elsewhere. This guide defines the term adaptation and discusses reasons for revising a book, why this is possible with an open textbook, and the challenges involved.”
Arts & Sciences
- The Political Imagination: Introduction to American Government, by Peter Kolozi and James E. Freeman; Contributors: Isa Vasquez (2022).
License: CC BY-NC-SA
“…a realistic, critical analysis as well as a hopeful, engagement-oriented narrative that encourages students to understand the important role they can play in the political system and in crafting a society in which they want to live. The Political Imagination draws on social and political theory and history offering an analytical as well as normative framework to think about the substance of politics, the procedures and institutions of government, and a dynamic, socially contingent definition of political power.”
- Dr. Brandle’s Introduction to American Government, by Shawna Mary Brandle, Kingsborough Community College (2021). License: CC BY-NC
“This is the reading and viewing for our course on American Government. It is a remix of the American Government 2E book from Openstax. You can read, view, explore, discuss, and annotate for our class in our reading group. If you prefer, you can download a PDF of the entire book to read offline.”
- A Practical Approach to Understanding Music Theory, by Charles Brooks, University of North Alabama (2022). License: CC BY-NC
“…a textbook designed for the non-music performance major or music business/audio engineer who needs to professionally interface with musicians without needing to write or compose music. The material is designed around a spiral learning model in which a very simple straightforward concept is introduced, defined and explained. From this point and forward the book adds one element of music theory after another until a broad base of musical understanding and application is achieved.”
- Sociology of the Family, by Amy Traber, Queensborough Community College (2022). License: CC BY-NC-SA
“This OER textbook provides students with a brief introduction to: the perspective, methods, and theories that constitute the sociology of the family; research on patterns and processes of dating/mating, cohabitation/marriage, parenting. divorce/remarriage, and family stressors/strengths in the United States. It was created through the integration of various OER texts, including OpenStax, Sociology Wikibooks, and many more.”
Professional Studies
- Active Bystander Intervention: Training and Facilitation Guide: Training for Preventing and Responding to Sexual Violence in B.C. Post-Secondary Institutions, by Sexual Violence Training Development Team, BCcampus (2021). License: CC BY
“A workshop and facilitation guide to support B.C. post-secondary institutions to prevent and respond to sexual violence and misconduct. Active Bystander Intervention is a 90-minute workshop for all members of the campus community: students, faculty, administrators, and staff. This training helps learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to recognize and intervene in an incident of sexual violence as well as discuss strategies for creating a safer campus community. Uses the 4D’s (Direct, Distract, Delegate, Delay) Active Bystander Intervention Model. (The slide deck that accompanies this resource can be downloaded from the Introduction.)”
- Advanced Professional Communication: A Principled Approach to Workplace Writing, by Melissa Ashman and Arley Cruthers, Fanshawe College (2021). License: CC BY-NC-SA
“This resource is designed to guide college students in advancing their existing skills in communication by using a principled approach to business communication for managerial and leadership success in the modern workplace.”
- The Asynchronous Cookbook, by Office of Digital Learning & Inquiry, Middlebury College (2021). License: CC BY-NC-SA
“Whether you’re teaching mostly in person but looking for some regular, asynchronous activities to add to your course, or teaching a fully online course, this resource is for you. The activities in this cookbook draw on research and good practice in online course design to provide recipes – concise and specific instructions and examples – for adding asynchronous activities to a course. Meaningful interaction between students and instructors is a key ingredient in all of these recipes.”
- Cardiovascular Pathophysiology for Pre-Clinical Students, by Andrew Binks, Virginia Tech Libraries (2022). License: CC BY-NC-SA
“Cardiovascular Pathophysiology for Pre-Clinical Students, is an undergraduate medical-level resource for foundational knowledge of common cardiovascular diseases, disorders and pathologies. This text is designed for a course pre-clinical undergraduate medical curriculum and it is aligned to USMLE(r) (United States Medical Licensing Examination) content guidelines.”
- Dentistry Environment Essentials, by Nicole Stormon, Tachae Douglas-Miller, and Sowmya Shetty, The University of Queensland (2022). License: CC BY-NC
“The setting where dental procedures take place is a unique environment. The design of a dental clinic or surgery is purposefully built to promote ergonomic practice, safe procedures, efficiency and facilitates infection control. This book aims to introduce the dental environment and give practical guidance on how to navigate the equipment, instruments, procedures and how to stay safe. All dental team members require an appreciation and understanding of the principles in this book to ensure patients receive the safest and most pleasant experience when receiving dental treatment.”
Technology & Design
- Patterns for Beginning Programmers, by David Bernstein, James Madison University (2022). License: CC BY
“Programming patterns are solutions to problems that require the creation of a small fragment of code that will be part of a larger program. Hence, this book is about teaching you how to write such fragments of code. However, it is not about teaching you the syntax of the statements in the fragments, it assumes that you already know the syntax. Instead, it is about finding solutions to problems that arise when first learning to program.”
- Production Ergonomics: Designing Work Systems to Support Optimal Human Performance, by Cecilia Berlin and Caroline Adams, Ubiquity Press (2017). License: CC BY
“To help budding system designers and production engineers tackle design challenges holistically, this book offers a multi-faceted orientation in the prerequisites for healthy and effective human work. We cover physical, cognitive and organizational aspects of ergonomics, and provide both the individual human perspective and that of groups and populations, ending up with a look at global challenges that require workplaces to become more socially and economically sustainable. This book is written to provide a solid foundation for improving industrial workplaces to attract and retain healthy and productive staff in the long run.
- Repairing Infrastructures: The Maintenance of Materiality and Power, by Christopher R. Henke and Benjamin Sims, The MIT Press (2020). License: CC BY-NC
“Infrastructures—communication, food, transportation, energy, and information—are all around us, and their enduring function and influence depend on the constant work of repair. In this book, Christopher Henke and Benjamin Sims explore the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life. Henke and Sims offer examples, from local to global, to investigate not only the role of repair in maintaining infrastructures themselves but also the social and political orders that are created and sustained through them. Repair can encompass not only the kind of work we most commonly associate with the term but also any set of practices aimed at restoring a sense of normalcy or credibility to the places and institutions we inhabit in everyday life…They show that repair is an essential if often overlooked aspect of understanding the broader impact and politics of infrastructures. Understanding repair helps us better understand infrastructures and the scope of their influence on our lives.”
City Tech O.E.R. team
Cailean Cooney, Assistant Professor, OER Librarian: ccooney@citytech.cuny.edu
Joshua Peach, Adjunct Reference & OER Librarian: jpeach@citytech.cuny.edu
Rachel Jones, Adjunct Librarian
