An e-book (PDF) that integrates the materials for the Spring 2017 offering of LAFF, including 270+ short videos, answers to exercises, browser-based activities, and programming exercises in M-script (the programming language of MATLAB). This artifact encompasses a full undergraduate introductory course on linear algebra and is used at the primary resource for such a course at UT-Austin.

This course provides an introduction to critical thinking, informal logic, and a small amount of formal logic; its purpose is to provide students with the basic tools of analytical reasoning. Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to: Understand what critical thinking is and why it is valuable; Distinguish between good and bad definitions, Recognize the differences between explicit and implicit meaning, and remove ambiguities of meaning from unclearly worded statements; Recognize arguments in writing, pick out good and bad arguments by their form, and construct sound arguments of their own; Diagnose the most common reasoning errors and fallacies, as well as identify ways of improving them; Understand the basics of sentential and predicate logic and gain practice manipulating meaning symbolically; Understand the rudiments of scientific methodology and reasoning; Evaluate arguments that rely on specific types of visual representation; Understand the basics of strategic reasoning and problem solving; Understand the particular challenges involved in reasoning about values and morality; Diagnose fallacies and evaluate arguments about values and morality. (Philosophy 102)

This course is a comprehensive introduction to the structure of the American economy as compared to other economic structures. Supply and demand, GDP, inflation, monetary policy, money and banking, taxation, economic growth, international exchange and comparisons of classical, Keynesian and monetarist economic philosophies are presented. It is required for business majors planning to transfer to 4-year business programs in the state of Washington.Login: guest_oclPassword: ocl

This textbook is for advanced Spanish composition students. The textbook includes topics on grammar and syntax, as well as exercises and readings providing the students a more personalized and effective learning experience adjusted to the specific challenges they encounter in today’s global world.

Table of Contents
I. Los falsos cognados
Introducción
Lenguas en contacto/préstamos lingüísticos
Falsos cognados o amigos
Lista de falsos cognados más frecuentes
Ejercicios de repaso
Antes de leer
Lectura: Ilán Stavans, El Quixote
Cuestionario sobre la lectura
Ejercicios: Escritura en movimiento
Ejercicios de repaso
II. Los vicios de dicción
Introducción
Los vicios de dicción
Ejercicios de repaso
Antes de leer
Lectura: Alejandro Higashi, “Escribir con buena ortografía… no tiene precio”
Cuestionario sobre la lectura
Ejercicios: Escritura en movimiento
Ejercicios de repaso

This course is a comprehensive introduction to the functions of the market system including allocation of scarce resources, production of goods and services, determination of prices, output and profit maximization in competitive and monopolistic markets. It is required for business majors planning to transfer to 4-year business programs in the state of Washington.Login: guest_oclPassword: ocl

Organic chemistry is a two-semester course (Organic Chemistry I, SCC 251 and Organic Chemistry II, SCC 252) required for majors in Biology. The SCC 251 course has been designated for the Integrative Learning Core Competency as well the Digital Communication Ability. This course emphasizes the synthesis, structure, reactivity, and mechanisms of reaction of organic compounds. Laboratory stresses various organic synthetic and analytic techniques (distillation, extraction, chromatography and spectroscopy).
This lab provided an opportunity for students to go deeper with the chemistry content by correlating to the concepts they learned in General Chemistry courses such as Valence shell electron pair repulsion theory (VSEPR), resonance, polarity, dipole moment, acid-base reactions, mole concept, thermochemistry and chemical kinetics. In addition, for the experimental part, applying the techniques such as qualitative analysis of ions, filtration, melting point, optical spectroscopy, and molecular modelling. This lab was performed at the end of the semester when students are familiar with basic organic techniques such as distillation, crystallization, thin layer chromatography (TLC) and column chromatography--techniques they learned previously in this lab. Overall, this lab was designed to develop critical thinking and integrative learning skills while introducing students to the porphyrin and green chemistry concepts. This experiment illustrates the several principles of green chemistry and is easily extendable to introduce topics in other chemistry courses such as NMR spectroscopy (1H, 13C and 19F NMR), material chemistry, click chemistry, coordination chemistry and environmental chemistry.
Learning outcomes that can be assessed using this lab include an understanding of laboratory procedures (methods and techniques), safety hazards, and instrumentation, understanding of concepts and theories gained by performing the experiment, collecting data through observation and/or experimentation (TLC and column chromatography), interpretation of the data (percent yield, UV-vis spectra), drawing conclusions and perspective of the experiment. The knowledge students gain during this process will be useful to connect with future chemistry courses and can also be utilized to do research.
LaGuardia‰Ûªs Core Competencies and Communication Abilities
Main Course Learning Objectives: Based on the principles and methods of green chemistry concept, students will be able to develop the ability to analyze and evaluate organic chemical reactions and processes. Gather, analyze, and interpret experimental data and graph the UV visible spectra using Microsoft excel. The ChemDraw program is used to increase classroom experiences in the preparation of high quality chemical drawings. This software is used to draw and submit chemical compound. ChemDraw Professional can also be used to predict properties, generate spectra, construct correct IUPAC names, and calculate reaction stoichiometry.

Welcome to Mindful Technical Writing: An Introduction to the Fundamentals, an open textbook designed for use in co-requisite course pairings of developmental writing and introductory technical writing, or indeed in other lower-division college writing courses that focus on building study skills alongside effective workplace and academic writing skills. It offers a no-cost alternative to commercial products, combining practical guidance with interactive exercises and thoughtfully designed writing opportunities.

This book’s modular design and ample coverage of topics and genres means that it can be used flexibly over semester-long or stretch courses, allowing instructors and students to select the chapters that are most relevant for their needs. By blending new material with reviews of key topics, such as academic integrity, the chapters provide fresh perspectives on matters vital to the development of strong writing skills.

This book was made possible through grant support from Montana Technological University and the TRAILS OER program, funded by the Office of the Commissioner for Higher Education, Montana University System.

Web development is an evolving amalgamation of languages that work in concert to receive, modify, and deliver information between parties using the Internet as a mechanism of delivery.

While it is easy to describe conceptually, implementation is accompanied by an overwhelming variety of languages, platforms, templates, frameworks, guidelines, and standards. Navigating a project from concept to completion often requires more than mastery of one or two complementing languages, meaning today’s developers need both breadth, and depth, of knowledge to be effective.

This text provides the developer with an understanding of the various elements of web development by focusing on the concepts and fundamentals through the examples within, providing a foundation that allows easier transition to other languages and a better understanding of how to approach their work. The reader will be introduced to topics in a manner that follows most project development methods, from initial conceptualization and design through front end development, back end development, and introducing additional concepts like accessibility and security, while focusing on responsive design techniques. Each section of the text includes opportunities to practice the material and assess increased knowledge after examining the topics.

Music is an important part of human experience and the unending desire to express oneself in creative and imaginative ways. The purpose of this course is to help students further enhance their appreciation for music as a creative tool of the imagination, as entertainment, and as a window into who we are as social beings. Part of the course also helps students to advance their listening skills, which leads to a better understand of what music actually contains. For this purpose, the course explores western classical music; American folk, popular and religious music; along with a sampling of music from non-western cultures. Login: guest_oclPassword: ocl

This assignment titled “My Interdisciplinary Perspective on Climate Change” was developed in Fall 2020 as the signature assignment of the STEM Learning Community LC50 for students enrolled in the Biology program of the Natural Sciences department, at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY. The assignment targets Integrative Learning and Global Learning Core Competencies, and Digital/Oral Communication Abilities.
For this STEM Cluster, “Climate Change” is the shared theme that connects learning from the different disciplines and helps build students’ overall knowledge on an imperative issue that our planet currently faces. Work on this assignment entails a narrated digital student presentation on the various aspects of Climate Change such as causes, global effects and manifestations, and possible remedial solutions or suggested actions. Students also practice summarizing the research and learning on this theme from the various courses undertaken in the first semester.
The main goal of this signature assignment is to make connections among the ideas, experiences and learning acquired among the different courses, assignments and co-curricular activities of this semester that contributed to the students’ understanding of this global phenomenon. This high-stakes assignment is worth 20% of the final grade in NSF 101: First Year Seminar for Natural Sciences (program-core course). Students are guided by all four instructors of the Learning Community, which comprises of the courses- NSF 101, MAT 115: College Algebra and Trigonometry, ENG 101: Composition I, and HUC 106: Public Speaking, through a 12-week scaffolded process to complete work and showcase their findings as a well-informed Biology major and responsible citizen of society. This assignment meets the NSF101 learning objectives and helps the students to hone their skills on the targeted Core Competencies (Global/Integrative Learning) and Communication Abilities (Digital/Oral), thereby increasing their chances of being successful in the subsequent 200-level classes of their major.
LaGuardia's Core Competencies and Communication Abilities
Student artifacts were deposited for this assignment at the end of the semester for college-wide Benchmark Readings 2021, and the Fall 2020 Learning Communities Seminar (as the LC assignment). Due to the serious COVID-related situation in New York state in Fall 2020, including high incidence of the disease and the associated challenging and technical issues at some students’ end, more emphasis was placed on helping the students learn how to prepare a digital presentation embodying their work on science, data analysis, writing and communication skills, while incorporating elements of integrative and global learning from all four classes on Climate Change. However, when the assignment is implemented again in the future, both Digital and Oral Communication Abilities will be fostered in all student work. It is noteworthy that some students managed to cover both these abilities in their work in Fall 2020 also.

MyOpenMath is an online course management and assessment system for mathematics and other quantitative fields. MyOpenMath’s focus is providing rich algorithmically generated assessment to support the use of free, open textbooks like the ones listed on OpenTextBookStore.com.

MyOpenMath is a collaborative community of users. MyOpenMath.com provides managed hosting of the open source IMathAS online assessment software. Questions and pre-built courses are all created by faculty in the user community and shared with others in the spirit of openness. Experienced users provide peer-to-peer support through discussion forums.

MyOpenMath.com is operated by the non-profit organization MyOpenMath.

This activity guides students through the process needfinding to identify areas of need for their creation of a technology for the "public good." Students will conduct contextual inquiry to identify the needs of their target audience.

Comments
Although this activity can be used in isolation, it is intended to be part of a series guiding students towards the creation of a front-end of a website. The series (all published as OER) consist of:

a) Needfinding
b) Personas, Scenarios and Storyboards
c) Front-end Website Design and Development
d) Accessibility Evaluation

Students write a program that reads data based on a provided banking scenario, work on inputs, and generate a report after the data is processed.

This OER Package includes a description, lesson plan, and materials for a discussion session addressing: Why are open research practices, open access, and author rights important to Psychology graduate students? How might tools and resources related to these impact choices graduate students may make in research design, research practice and documentation, and venues for sharing research results?

This session included a pre-class reading assignment and an in-class session with discussion and hands-on activities. The topics of focus were: open research practices, open access, and selecting publication venues for sharing research. These topics were discussed in the context of authorship as experienced by students in undergraduate and graduate programs, including course papers, theses and dissertations, conference presentations, and journal article publishing. Discussions were based on three readings completed prior to the in-class session that covered aspects of: open access, peer review, and open research practices. The class also discussed evaluation criteria to use when selecting a publication venue.

Inspired by Dr. Kim Hall’s video Why Study Shakespeare Today?, 2:46 (Folger Shakespeare Library, Jul. 11, 2012), this project seeks to link in conversation teachers and learners from diverse places and at different kinds of selective and open-admission, four-year and two-year educational institutions.

Through assignments on and discussions of Shakespeare’s Othello, we can share thoughts on controversial social issues such as race, migration, politics, rule of law, sex, gender, and domestic violence. We can ask about the difficulties, drawbacks, and benefits of studying these topics in Shakespeare’s plays, begin conversations, and hear different perspectives.

This activity guides students towards the creation of personas, scenarios and storyboards for a product/website that they are creating.

Comments
Although this activity can be used in isolation, it is intended to be part of a series guiding students towards the creation of a front-end of a website. The series (all published as OER) consist of:

a) Needfinding
b) Personas, Scenarios and Storyboards
c) Front-end Website Design and Development
d) Accessibility Evaluation

This is an introductory project that addresses identifying the Elements of Art and Principles of Composition in immediate surroundings and provides these terms a real-time life application. The project is interactive and exploratory, requiring individual observation of a students' physical world. This project can be modified to include more images, changes in grid template and combined to include both Elements and Principles together; incluiding identifying other terms in art such as mediums. The project can be used in an online formatted course or a face to face environment. Including Art Appreciation, Art Orientation, Two-Dimensional Design and Three-Dimensional Design studio courses. 

Students in this course will explore evolutionary theory, including the core concepts of basic genetics and the modern synthesis of evolution. Students will examine, critically evaluate and explain scientific claims about the origins of humankind and modern human variation, as well as biocultural evolution. Students will develop critical thinking and communication skills through the application of essential anthropological approaches, theories, and methods.Login: guest_oclPassword: ocl

The online educational resource Physics For Everyone is the scaffolding for a 3 contact hour, 3 credit general education course that conveys the relevance, beauty, and power of physics as a foundation of science and technology in the public interest.

This slide deck provides the outline for the semester-long course. Each week’s lecture topics, with key points to be covered, are highlighted in two slides, which also list writing prompts, problem-solving exercises, and labs. Also, we have curated a list of high-quality online video resources that students (and instructors) should use to help them learn (and teach) physics ideas and concepts using demonstrations, animations, and humor. Many of those videos are parts of larger series and programs, created by some of the most skilled and popular online presenters in the world; that means some of their content is commercially sponsored, but all the content is free to students and instructors. Finally, we have envisioned this course so that students are assessed with a large set of low-stakes, just-in-time-type assignments and laboratory exercises.

This work has been generously supported by New America’s PIT-UN (Public Interest Technology University Network) challenge grant program, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.

This open course introduces students to the scholarly communications system — with particular emphasis on the scholarly journal publishing mechanism — wherein new information is created, evaluated, disseminated, and preserved.

The course content is organized into three parts. First, The Fundamentals aims to acquaint students with the basic framework of contemporary scholarly publishing: how it operates, who is involved, what roles they play, etc., as well as asking students to consider how they themselves might engage with the system as consumers and producers of scholarly knowledge. Chapters include sample exercises to reinforce content, as well as recommended resources for further study. Next, (Some) Problems raises questions and issues that complicate contemporary scholarly publishing. While scholarship and research have the noble goal of building and sharing new knowledge for the public good, they are also inextricably bound to real-world economic structures and inequalities. This section examines how the scholarly publishing system intersects with money, power, and privilege. It asks students to grapple with the system’s structural, systemic failings, as well as contemplate ways in which it might be improved. Finally, the course culminates in two final Assignments that instructors can use as part of the curriculum, or that independent learners can work through on their own. These are open-ended in that there are no discrete right or wrong answers, but rather opportunities for students to grapple with and reflect on the content of the course.

Material in this course can be used in classroom settings or as self-paced tutorial. Appropriate audiences include upper-level undergraduate or graduate students who are interested in publishing their work; library & information science (LIS) students or early-career librarians interested in scholarly communications; and anyone else who wants a better understanding of the scholarly publishing system and the academic culture in which it is rooted.