American English Sounds is a web resource that allows English as a Second Language (ESL) students to practice perceiving and producing the sounds of American English in order to improve their pronunciation.
The Beginning Korean 1 textbook is designed for elementary Korean learners to practice and learn how to communicate in Korean. It provides basic grammar, vocabulary, and discourse information that are essential to beginning level students.
The Korean Activity Book 1 is designed to provide various useful materials for practicing Korean. This book is ideal for learners at the Novice Low to Novice High levels who want to practice writing and pronouncing hangeul, communicate in Korean by creating sentences using basic grammar and vocabulary, and understand and create simple conversations that are useful in everyday conversations. The Korean Activity Book 1 is not a textbook, so it does not include lengthy explanations on grammar or vocabulary. However, it includes a lot of resources of natural conversations and useful vocabularies that are commonly used in contemporary Korean. It also includes useful tips to clarify confusing structures and words & expressions to novice level learners.
This is an online Swahili course for beginners that is proficient-based built to improve listening, speaking, writing and reading skills. This course uses authentic video that helps to understand the culture of Swahili speaking countries in Eastern Africa. Students will acquire basic skills for beginning level of studying Swahili as a foreign language such as greeting, shopping, transportation, food, and family. You will have an opportunity to listen and practice speaking the language at your own pace. You may need to follow up with and instructor near you for any help. The course DOES NOT count toward any college credits but enable students and teachers of Swahili as a foreign language to use it as additional material to what they are learning in their classrooms.
Introduction 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 textbooks 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 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.
Why do affluent, liberal, and design-rich cities like Minneapolis have some of the biggest racial disparities in the country? How can designers help to create more equitable communities? Introduction to Design Equity, an open access book for students and professionals, maps design processes and products against equity research to highlight the pitfalls and potentials of design as a tool for building social justice.
We often make judgments about good and bad, right and wrong. Philosophical ethics is the critical examination of these and other concepts central to how we evaluate our own and each others’ behavior and choices.
This text examines some of the main threads of discussion on these topics that have developed over the last couple of millenia, mostly within the Western cultural tradition. It considers basic questions about moral and ethical judgment: Is there such a thing as something that is really right or really wrong independent of time, place and perspective? What is the relationship between religion and ethics? How can we reconcile self-interest and ethics? Is it ever acceptable to harm one person in order to help others? What do recent discussions in evolutionary biology or have to say about human moral systems? What is the relation between gender and ethics? The authors invite you to participate in their exploration of these and many other questions in philosophical ethics.
If you are adopting or adapting this book for a course, please let us know on our adoption form for the Introduction to Philosophy open textbook series: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdwf2E7bRGvWefjhNZ07kgpgnNFxVxxp-iidPE5gfDBQNGBGg/viewform?usp=sf_link.
Introduction to Philosophy: Logic provides students with the concepts and skills necessary to identify and evaluate arguments effectively. The chapters, all written by experts in the field, provide an overview of what arguments are, the different types of arguments one can expect to encounter in both philosophy and everyday life, and how to recognise common argumentative mistakes.
Introduction to Philosophy: Philosophy of Mind (edited by Heather Salazar) surveys the central themes in philosophy of mind and places them in a historical and contemporary context intended to engage first-time readers in the field. It focuses on debates about the status and character of the mind and its seemingly subjective nature in an apparently more objective world.
Written by experts and emerging researchers in their subject areas, each chapter brings clarity to complex material and involves the reader through a wealth of examples. Many chapters include applications of the concepts to film and literature that will stimulate readers to firmly grasp the significance of the philosophy of mind. Subjects covered are how the mind fits into the material world and how to analyze its properties. In that vein, substance dualism, materialism, behaviorism, functionalism, and property dualism are all explored.
In addition, it includes insightful contributions on how to explain seemingly subjective feelings, the mystery of consciousness, conceptual understanding of the world outside of the mind, and free will. The book is designed to be used alone or alongside a reader of historical and contemporary original sources.
If you are adopting or adapting this book for a course, please let us know on our adoption form for the Introduction to Philosophy open textbook series: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdwf2E7bRGvWefjhNZ07kgpgnNFxVxxp-iidPE5gfDBQNGBGg/viewform?usp=sf_link.
Introduction to Philosophy: Philosophy of Religion introduces some of the major traditional arguments for and against the existence of God, as well as some less well-known, but thought-provoking arguments for the existence of God, and one of the most important new challenges to religious belief from the Cognitive Science of Religion. An introductory chapter traces the connection between philosophy and religion throughout Western history, and a final chapter addresses the place of non-Western and non-monotheistic religions within contemporary philosophy of religion.
Iowa State University's Languages and Cultures for the Professions (LCP) program allows students to pursue a professional track degree—in the College of Business, the College of Agriculture, or the College of Engineering—while at the same time pursuing a second major in their chosen language in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (within the Department of World Languages and Cultures). But, it’s not just a language that students enrolled in this program are learning. LCP students are gaining the skills to be successful cultural entrepreneurs; they are not only able to communicate in a second language, but they become culturally competent and develop the skills to succeed in multicultural and multilingual professional settings. In this video, LCP graduates and current students share what it means to them to be culturally competent global professionals.
Iowa State University's Languages and Cultures for the Professions (LCP) program allows students to pursue a professional track degree—in the College of Business, the College of Agriculture, or the College of Engineering—while at the same time pursuing a second major in their chosen language in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (within the Department of World Languages and Cultures). But, it’s not just a language that students enrolled in this program are learning. LCP students are gaining the skills to be successful cultural entrepreneurs; they are not only able to communicate in a second language, but they become culturally competent and develop the skills to succeed in multicultural and multilingual professional settings. In this video, global professionals share about their current positions and workplace culture.
Iowa State University's Languages and Cultures for the Professions (LCP) program allows students to pursue a professional track degree—in the College of Business, the College of Agriculture, or the College of Engineering—while at the same time pursuing a second major in their chosen language in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (within the Department of World Languages and Cultures). But, it’s not just a language that students enrolled in this program are learning. LCP students are gaining the skills to be successful cultural entrepreneurs; they are not only able to communicate in a second language, but they become culturally competent and develop the skills to succeed in multicultural and multilingual professional settings. In this video, LCP graduates and students discuss experiences that helped them to feel confident in multilingual professional settings.
Informed by a writing philosophy that values both spontaneity and discipline, Michelle Bonczek Evory’s Naming the Unnameable: An Approach to Poetry for New Generations offers practical advice and strategies for developing a writing process that is centered on play and supported by an understanding of America’s rich literary traditions. With consideration to the psychology of invention, Bonczek Evory provides students with exercises aimed to make writing in its early stages a form of play that gives way to more enriching insights through revision, embracing the writing of poetry as both a love of language and a tool that enables us to explore ourselves and better understand the world. The volume includes resources for students seeking to publish and build a writing-centered lifestyle or career. Poets featured range in age, subject, and style, and many are connected to colleges in the State University of New York system. Naming the Unnameable promotes an understanding of poetry as a living art of which students are a part, and provides ways for students to involve themselves in the growing contemporary poetry community that thrives in America today.
The materials in this project are specifically designed for a third-year Spanish Writing course, offering guidance to instructors on how to develop each of the four modules that constitute the course: Description, narration, argumentation, and exposition.
For each of the modules, a variety of resources are presented, including peer review training sessions, classroom activities, handouts to guide students’ writing processes, and peer review guidelines. These resources follow the methodology of writing through workshops (“Talleres”) and may be used in support of the current course materials (i.e., textbook “Taller de Escritores”).
The OER resources are also helpful for students, because they provide clear guidance on how to write and peer review each of the essays, and they further specify the assessment rubrics according to the curricular contents of the of the Spanish Writing course.
Open Music Theory is an open-source, interactive, online “text”book for college-level music theory courses. This textbook is meant to support active student engagement with music in the theory classroom. That means that this text is meant to take a back seat to student music making (and breaking). It is not the center of the course. The three original authors use this textbook in the context of “inverted” or “flipped” courses, often following an inquiry-based model. As a result, most of the pages in this textbook do not read like a typical twentieth-century textbook. They are somewhere in between prosy lecture notes and reference material, with minimal graphical or audio examples. Also, unlike many resources for “flipped” classes, there are few resources in this textbook where the core information is presented in video. We made these decisions consciously, so that this would not simply be a multimedia, web-based version of an industrial-era textbook. Rather, we wanted to create a textbook that could serve as a quick reference in the context of active musical engagement.
Philosophical Thought: across cultures and through the ages, is an open-educational resource (OER) to be used as a collection of readings for introductory philosophy courses. The objectives for developing and sharing this open resource are three-fold:
1. to provide a collection of philosophical works that can be used as a foundation for faculty and students to use in undergraduate philosophy courses
2. to provide a resource that is free to students
3. to provide a resource that compiles philosophical thought from a variety of cultures and eras
The works included in this book come from a wide range of sources. However, this book is indebted to Henry Imler’s editorial work on Sapienta and Phronesis, both of which are OER texts available on Pressbooks.
Salón de clase, Intermediate Spanish for Education Professionals is a comprehensive intermediate Spanish open access textbook with reading, listening, speaking, and writing practice for students who have an interest and/or intend to pursue a career in the field of Education (teachers, administrators, counselors, psychologists, social workers, support staff members, paraprofessionals, among others). This Open Education Resource (OER) aims to explore the role of Spanish language and Spanish speakers in the American education system, as well as to improve student communicative abilities in Spanish. Salón de clase integrates interactive activities (h5p), video interviews with Spanish speakers to present authentic materials, and topics related to education. Grammar is not presented as a standalone topic, but it is seemly integrated into all parts of this book. For more details go to: https://salondeclase.sites.uiowa.edu/
Our Class Piano & Piano Pedagogy teaching professor Dr. Janci Bronson has created a YouTube education channel designed to support student virtual learning within group piano and/or private lessons.
The educational channel covers the following key topics: beginning keyboard technique, sight-reading, transposition, scales, arpeggios, chords, harmonization, & improvisation.
Note: each video comes with closed captions, brief descriptions, suggestions to related videos, and chapters (“show more” under the video description).
We hope you may find these supplemental videos helpful to share with your group piano students. We welcome your feedback and suggestions to continue improving the videos.
Iowa State University's Class Piano & Piano Pedagogy teaching professor Dr. Janci Bronson has created a YouTube education channel, Dr. Janci Bronson on YouTube, designed to support student virtual learning within group piano and/or private lessons. Sponsored by the Miller Open Education Mini-Grant Program at Iowa State University, the channel covers the following key topics: beginning keyboard technique, sight-reading, transposition, scales, arpeggios, chords, harmonization, and improvisation.
Note: each video comes with closed captions, brief descriptions, suggestions to related videos, and chapters (“show more” under the video description).
We hope you may find these supplemental videos helpful to share with your group piano students. We welcome your feedback and suggestions to continue improving the videos.