Digital library
Textbooks, references and open learning resources.
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Fundamentals of Business Math
Lisa Koster; Tracey Chase · Conestoga College · 2023
This text will provide students with learning tools to develop fundamental mathematic skills and help them to improve basic arithmetic skills and develop reasoning and problem-solving skills.
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Self-directed multimodal learning in higher education
Jako Olivier · AOSIS Publishing · 2020
This book aims to provide an overview of theoretical and practical considerations in terms of self-directed multimodal learning within the university context. Multimodal learning is approached in terms of the levels of multimodality and specifically blended learning and the mixing of modes of delivery (contact and distance education). As such, this publication will provide a unique snapshot of multimodal practices within higher education through a self-directed learning epistemological lens. The book covers issues such as what self-directed multimodal learning entails, mapping of specific publications regarding blended learning, blended learning in mathematics, geography, natural science and computer literacy, comparative experiences in distance education as well as situated and culturally appropriate learning in multimodal contexts. This book provides a unique focus on multimodality in terms of learning and delivery within the context of self-directed learning. Therefore, the publication would not only advance the scholarship of blended and open distance learning in South Africa, but also the contribute to enriching the discourse regarding self-direction. From this book readers will get an impression of the latest trends in literature in terms of multimodal self-directed learning in South Africa as well as unique empirical work being done in this regard.
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A Different Road To College: A Guide For Transitioning Non-Traditional Students
Alise Lamoreaux · Open Oregon Educational Resources · 2016
A Different Road To College: A Guide For Transitioning Non-Traditional Students is designed to introduce students to the contextual issues of college. Non-traditional students have an ever-growing presence on college campuses, especially community colleges. This open educational resource is designed to engage students in seeing themselves as college students and understanding the complexity of what that means to their lives. Non-traditional students face critical issues surrounding participation and success in college. These critical issues include, but are not limited to, the following Strategies for managing competing needs on their time Difficulty navigating institutional environments Understanding the culture of college Transitional services not in place to the same degree as for “traditional” students Knowledgeable support systems Personal barriers Unpredictable influences on their schedules Work first, study second priorities Paying for college Underprepared foundation skills (Reading, Writing, Math, Computer Literacy, Human Relations, Oral Communication).Most textbooks available on the topic of college transition/success today focus on the traditional 18-year old student and the needs of someone living away from home for the first time.The goal of the book is to help students understand how to select the right college for them and then become acquainted with the inner workings and language of college. The book is designed to be a practical guide for first-generation college students as they navigate potentially unfamiliar topics such as understanding the costs of college beyond tuition, navigating college websites, and defining critical language needed to understand communication regarding the context and culture of the college.
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A Quick Guide to Quantitative Research in the Social Sciences
Christine Davies · University of Wales Trinity Saint David · 2020
This resource is intended as an easy-to-use guide for anyone who needs some quick and simple advice on quantitative aspects of research in social sciences, covering subjects such as education, sociology, business, nursing. If you area qualitative researcher who needs to venture into the world of numbers, or a student instructed to undertake a quantitative research project despite a hatred for maths, then this booklet should be a real help. The booklet was amended in 2022 to take into account previous review comments.
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Dublin Core Quick Start
Caitlin Mathesis; Bailey VandeKamp; Micah Bateman · University of Iowa · 2024
This book is designed as a quick introduction to authoring metadata using basic elements from the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.
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Intermediate Microeconomics
Patrick Emerson · Oregon State University · 2019
Intermediate Microeconomics is a comprehensive microeconomic theory text that uses real world policy questions to motivate and illustrate the material in each chapter. Intermediate Microeconomics is an approachable yet rigorous textbook that covers the entire scope of traditional microeconomic theory and includes two mathematical approaches, allowing instructors to teach the material with or without calculus. With real-world policy topics as an entree into each subject, Intermediate Microeconomics will help students engage with the material and facilitate learning not only the concepts, but their importance and application as well.
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International Economics: Theory and Policy
Steve Suranovic · Saylor Foundation · 2012
This text strives to reach a median between these two approaches. First, I believe that students need to learn the theory and models to understand how economists understand the world. I also think these ideas are accessible to most students if they are explained thoroughly. This text presents numerous models in some detail, not by employing advanced mathematics, but rather by walking students through a detailed description of how a model's assumptions influence its conclusions. Second, and perhaps more important, students must learn how the models connect with the real world. I believe that theory is done primarily to guide policy. We do positive economics to help answer the normative questions; for example, what should a country do about its trade policy or its exchange rate policy? The results from models give us insights that help us answer these questions. Thus this text strives to explain why each model is interesting by connecting its results to some aspect of a current policy issue. A prime example is found in Chapter 11 "Evaluating the Controversy between Free Trade and Protectionism" of this book, which addresses the age-old question of whether countries should choose free trade or some type of selected protection. The chapter demonstrates how the results of the various models presented throughout the text contribute to our understanding of this long-standing debate.
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Introduction to Economic Analysis
Preston McAfee; Tracy Lewis · Saylor Foundation · 2009
This book presents standard intermediate microeconomics material and some material that, in the authors' view, ought to be standard but is not. Introductory economics material is integrated. Standard mathematical tools, including calculus, are used throughout. The book easily serves as an intermediate microeconomics text, and can be used for a relatively sophisticated undergraduate who has not taken a basic university course in economics. The focus of this book is on the conceptual tools and not on fluff. As such, it reflects the approach actually adopted by the majority of economists for understanding economic activity. There are lots of models and equations, and no pictures of economists ;-) Economic analysis is used in many situations. When British Petroleum sets the price for Alaskan crude oil, it uses an estimated demand model, both for gasoline consumers and also for the refineries to which BP sells. Economic analysis was used by experts in the antitrust suit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice both to understand Microsoft's incentive to foreclose (eliminate from the market) rival Netscape and consumer behavior in the face of alleged foreclosure. Stock market analysts use economic models to forecast the profits of companies to predict the price of their stocks. When the government forecasts the budget deficit or considers a change in environmental regulations, it uses economic models. This book presents the building blocks of the models in common use by an army of economists thousands of times per day. This book, plus econometrics, provides most of the economic analysis tools to take upper division economics courses of any type.
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International Trade: Theory and Policy
Steve Suranovic · Saylor Foundation · 2010
International Trade: Theory and Policy is built on Steve Suranovic's belief that to understand the international economy, students need to learn how economic models are applied to real world problems. It is true what they say, that ”economists do it with models.“ That's because economic models provide insights about the world that are simply not obtainable solely by discussion of the issues. International Trade: Theory and Policy presents a variety of international trade models including the Ricardian model, the Heckscher-Ohlin model, and the monopolistic competition model. It includes trade policy analysis in both perfectly competitive and imperfectly competitive markets. The text also addresses current issues such as free trade area formation and administered protection policies. The models are developed, not by employing advanced mathematics, but rather by walking students through a detailed description of how a model's assumptions influence its conclusions. But more importantly, each model and theory is connected to real world policy issues. The main purpose of the text is to provide a thorough grounding in the arguments concerning the age-old debate about free trade versus protectionism. This text has the following unique features: The text begins with an historical overview of trade policy issues to provide context for the theory. The text concludes with a detailed economic argument supporting free trade.The welfare analysis in the Ricardian, Heckscher-Ohlin and specific factors models emphasize the redistributive effects of free trade by calculating changes in real incomes.The trade policy chapter provides a comprehensive look at many more trade policies than are found in a printed textbook. A chapter about domestic policies contains an evaluation of domestic taxes and subsidies that are often ignored in traditional trade textbooks but are increasingly important as large countries complain more about each other's domestic agriculture policies and labor and en
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Introduction to Physical Oceanography
Robert Stewart · 2008
This textbook covers physical-oceanographic processes, theories, data, and measurements, targeted at upper-division undergraduates and graduate students in oceanography, meteorology, and ocean engineering. In addition to the classical topics, the author includes discussions of heat fluxes, the role of the ocean in climate, the deep circulation, equatorial processes including El Nino, data bases used by oceanographers, the role of satellites and data from space, ship-based measurements, and the importance of vorticity in understanding oceanic flows. Students should have studied differential equations and introductory college physics, although math is de-emphasized.
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Mechanics and Relativity
Timon Idema · TU Delft Open · 2018
In Mechanics and Relativity, the reader is taken on a tour through time and space. Starting from the basic axioms formulated by Newton and Einstein, the theory of motion at both the everyday and the highly relativistic level is developed without the need of prior knowledge. The relevant mathematics is provided in an appendix. The text contains various worked examples and a large number of original problems to help the reader develop an intuition for the physics. Applications covered in the book span a wide range of physical phenomena, including rocket motion, spinning tennis rackets and high-energy particle collisions.
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Physical Chemistry
Yingbin Ge · Central Washington University · 2026
This Physical Chemistry textbook by Yingbin Ge is an open-access resource meticulously crafted for undergraduate students in chemistry, biochemistry, and related STEM fields. The text strikes a precise balance between conceptual clarity and mathematical rigor, ensuring students build a deep understanding of thermodynamics, kinetics, quantum chemistry, and statistical mechanics. What sets this text apart is its student-centered pedagogy. Rather than focusing on formalism alone, Ge guides learners through step-by-step derivations that prioritize physical meaning. By explicitly addressing common misconceptions and integrating worked examples, the book transforms complex theory into manageable insights. Its modular structure offers instructors the flexibility to adapt the material to various course sequences, while the accompanying suite of lecture and tutorial videos makes it a comprehensive, accessible solution for the modern classroom.
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Atomic Physics for Everyone: An Introduction to Atomic Physics, Quantum Mechanics, and Precision Spectroscopy with No College-Level Prerequisites
Will Raven · Springer · 2025
This open access textbook introduces beginning undergraduate students and high school students to the world of quantum mechanics and atomic spectroscopy. Requiring no previous knowledge of physics and no math beyond basic algebra and sines and cosines, this book focuses on concepts to make the excitement of atomic physics more accessible for learners than ever before. It comes replete with learning goals, exercises and solutions, and an optional experimental component, making this text readily adoptable for both the classroom and the undergraduate lab. The book takes the reader on a lively and engaging tour through topics at the forefront of current science, including photons, quantum numbers, atomic energy levels, some different spectroscopy techniques, electronic structure, atomic notation, angular momentum, hyperfine structure, isotope shifts, the strong force, an introduction to the Standard Model of Particle Physics, and more.
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Threshold Concepts in Biochemistry
Julian Pakay; Hendrika Duivenvoorden; Thomas Shafee; Kaitlin Clarke · La Trobe University · 2023
Biochemistry (and Molecular Biology) represent one of the fastest-growing fields of scientific research and technical innovation and the resulting biotechnology is increasingly applied to other fields of study. So, an understanding of Biochemistry is increasingly important for students in all biological disciplines. However, at the same time, the content is inherently complex, highly abstract, and often deeply rooted in the pure sciences – mathematics, chemistry, and physics. This makes it difficult to both learn and to teach. This book is designed as a succinct and focused resource, specifically aimed to help students grasp key threshold concepts in Biochemistry. Due to their troublesome nature, understanding threshold concepts is a cognitively demanding task. By using a series of thematically linked case studies that accompany theory, the cognitive load will be reduced. This will free up students to focus on learning concepts rather than distracting them with unnecessary specifics.
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Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet
Thomas Murphy · eScholarship · 2021
Where is humanity going? How realistic is a future of fusion and space colonies? What constraints are imposed by physics, by resource availability, and by human psychology? Are default expectations grounded in reality? This textbook, written for a general-education audience, aims to address these questions without either the hype or the indifference typical of many books. The message throughout is that humanity faces a broad sweep of foundational problems as we inevitably transition away from fossil fuels and confront planetary limits in a host of unprecedented ways—a shift whose scale and probable rapidity offers little historical guidance. Salvaging a decent future requires keen awareness, quantitative assessment, deliberate preventive action, and—above all—recognition that prevailing assumptions about human identity and destiny have been cruelly misshapen by the profoundly unsustainable trajectory of the last 150 years. The goal is to shake off unfounded and unexamined expectations, while elucidating the relevant physics and encouraging greater facility in quantitative reasoning. After addressing limits to growth, population dynamics, uncooperative space environments, and the current fossil underpinnings of modern civilization, various sources of alternative energy are considered in detail— assessing how they stack up against each other, and which show the greatest potential. Following this is an exploration of systemic human impediments to effective and timely responses, capped by guidelines for individual adaptations resulting in reduced energy and material demands on the planet’s groaning capacity. Appendices provide refreshers on math and chemistry, as well as supplementary material of potential interest relating to cosmology, electric transportation, and an evolutionary perspective on humanity’s place in nature.
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All Things Flow: Fluid Mechanics for the Natural Sciences
William Smyth · Oregon State University · 2019
This book began as lecture notes for an Oregon State University course in fluid mechanics, designed for beginning graduate students in physical oceanography. Because of its fundamental nature, this course is often taken by students outside physical oceanography, e.g., atmospheric science, civil engineering, physics and mathematics. In later courses, the student will discover esoteric fluid phenomena such as internal waves that propagate through the sky, water phase changes that govern clouds, and planetary rotation effects that control large-scale winds and ocean currents. In contrast, this course concerns phenomena that we have all been familiar with since childhood: flows you see in sinks and bathtubs, in rivers, and at the beach. In this context, we develop the mathematical techniques and scientific reasoning skills needed for higher-level courses and professional research.
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Living with Earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest
Robert Yeats · Oregon State University · 2004
In this expanded new edition of Living with Earthquakes, Robert Yeats, a leading authority on earthquakes in California and the Pacific Northwest, describes the threat posed by the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a great earthquake fault which runs for hundreds of miles offshore from British Columbia to northern California. New research reveals subtle movements on the deepest part of this fault every 14-15 months — building up strain toward the next major earthquake. Combining cutting-edge research with practical safety information, Living with Earthquakes: • introduces new information about the danger from faults beneath major Northwest cities: the Seattle Fault, Tacoma Fault, and Portland Hills Fault• explores such topics as earthquake forecasting, catastrophe insurance, tsunamis, soil liquefaction, and seismic waves in Northwest lakes caused by Alaskan earthquakes• reviews earthquake preparedness and disaster response in the aftermath of the 2001 Nisqually earthquake, the worst natural disaster in Washington's history• suggests actions that citizens can take to protect their families and homesAn essential guide for anyone interested in understanding earthquake science or in preparing for the next earthquake, this book is also a call to action. Vivid descriptions of recent disasters — including the great tsunami that swept down the Northwest coast in 1964, the 1993 Oregon earthquakes, and the 2001 Nisqually earthquake — underscore the urgent need for better earthquake planning and awareness.
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Relativity Lite: A Pictorial Translation of Einstein’s Theories of Motion and Gravity
Jack Straton · Portland State University Library · 2020
Relativity Lite is designed for courses like my 100-student General Astronomy sequence. Relativity Lite translates the mathematical equations conventional relativity texts rely upon into pictures that are readily understood and contain within them the mathematical essentials. This new book would provide the comprehensive coverage needed to understand, in sufficient depth, these three linked areas of our reality.
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University Physics
Jeff Sanny; Samuel Ling · OpenStax · 2016
University Physics is a three-volume collection that meets the scope and sequence requirements for two- and three-semester calculus-based physics courses. Volume 1 covers mechanics, sound, oscillations, and waves. This textbook emphasizes connections between between theory and application, making physics concepts interesting and accessible to students while maintaining the mathematical rigor inherent in the subject. Frequent, strong examples focus on how to approach a problem, how to work with the equations, and how to check and generalize the result.
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The Adventure of Physics - Vol. V: Motion Inside Matter - Pleasure, Technology, and Stars
Christoph Schiller · Motion Mountain · 1990
This book is written for anybody who is curious about nature and motion. Curiosity about how bodies, images and empty space move leads to many adventures. This volume presents the best adventures about the motion inside people, inside animals, and inside any other type of matter – from the largest stars to the smallest nuclei. Motion inside bodies – dead or alive – is described by quantum theory. Quantum theory describes all motion with the quantum of action h, the smallest change observed in nature. Building on this basic idea, the text first shows how to describe life, death and pleasure. Then, the text explains the observations of chemistry, materials science, astrophysics and particle physics. In the structure of physics, these topics correspond to the three ‘quantum' points in Figure 1. The story of motion inside living and non-living matter, from the coldest gases to the hottest stars, is told here in a way that is simple, up to date and captivating. In order to be simple, the text focuses on concepts, while keeping mathematics to the necessary minimum. Understanding the concepts of physics is given precedence over using formulae in calculations. The whole text is within the reach of an undergraduate. In order to be up to date, the text is enriched by the many gems – both theoretical and empirical – that are scattered throughout the scientific literature. In order to be captivating, the text tries to startle the reader as much as possible. Read- ing a book on physics should be like going to a magic show. We watch, we are astonished, we do not believe our eyes, we think, and finally we understand the trick. When we look at nature, we often have the same experience. Indeed, every page presents at least one sur- prise that makes the reader think. Also numerous interesting challenges are proposed. The motto of the text, die Menschen stärken, die Sachen klären, a famous statement by Hartmut von Hentig on pedagogy, translates as: ‘To fortify people, to clarify thing