Students are given an engineering challenge: A nearby hospital has just installed a new magnetic resonance imaging facility that has the capacity to make 3D images of the brain and other body parts by exposing patients to a strong magnetic field. The hospital wishes for its entire staff to have a clear understanding of the risks involved in working near a strong magnetic field and a basic understanding of why those risks occur. Your task is to develop a presentation or pamphlet explaining the risks, the physics behind those risks, and the safety precautions to be taken by all staff members. This 10-lesson/4-activity unit was designed to provide hands-on activities to teach end-of-year electricity and magnetism topics to a first-year accelerated or AP physics class. Students learn about and then apply the following science concepts to solve the challenge: magnetic force, magnetic moments and torque, the Biot-Savart law, Ampere's law and Faraday's law. This module is built around the Legacy Cycle, a format that incorporates findings from educational research on how people best learn.

Macroeconomics provides an introduction to economic principles and market forces including supply and demand, unemployment, inflation, international trade and capital flows, monetary policy and banking, fiscal policy and globalization.

This course looks at the role of accounting in the management process, cost systems, capital investment, and more.

The marine environment is unique and because little light penetrates under water, technologies that use sound are required to gather information. The seafloor is characterized using underwater sound and acoustical systems. Current technological innovations enable scientists to further understand and apply information about animal locations and habitat. Remote sensing and exploration with underwater vehicles enables researchers to map and understand the sea floor. Similar technologies also aid in animal tracking, a method used within science and commercial industries. Through inquiry-based learning techniques, students learn the importance of habitat mapping and animal tracking.

This course was originally developed for the Open Course Library project.  The text used is Math in Society, edited by David Lippman, Pierce College Ft Steilacoom.  Development of this book was supported, in part, by the Transition Math Project and the Open Course Library Project. Topics covered in the course include problem solving, voting theory, graph theory, growth models, finance, data collection and description, and probability.

Microeconomics provides an introduction to economic principles and market forces including supply and demand, labor and financial markets, elasticity, consumer choices, cost and industry structure, competition, monopoly, negative and positive externalities, economic inequality, financial markets, international trade, globalization and protectionism.

Through three lessons and their four associated activities, students are introduced to concepts related to mixtures and solutions. Students consider how mixtures and solutions and atoms and molecules can influence new technologies developed by engineers. To begin, students explore the fundamentals of atoms and their structures. The building blocks of matter (protons, electrons, neutrons) are covered in detail. The next lesson examines the properties of elements and the periodic table one method of organization for the elements. The concepts of physical and chemical properties are also reviewed. Finally, the last lesson introduces the properties of mixtures and solutions. A comparison of different mixtures and solutions, their properties and their separation qualities are explored.

Welcome to Music 101.  I think you’ve made a smart choice to spend some weeks studying some of the greatest music ever written.  Consider for a moment how quickly a hit pop song passes from fashionable to forgotten.  Those of us that have been out of high school or college more years than we care to remember have certainly had the experience of hearing a favorite anthem of our youth and thinking, “Oh yeah, that song!  I’d forgotten that one.”  Think about that: the song was totally loved, then completely forgotten within a matter of just a few years.  Then consider that many of the composers that we will study have been dead for over two hundred years, and yet their music has never been forgotten and never stopped being performed and loved.  That, quite simply, is amazing.

This course is an exposition of the philosophy, principles, and materials of music from the Baroque Period to contemporary period with illustrative examples from the Baroque Period, Classical Period, Romantic Period, Contemporary Classical Music and Popular Music. The course is designed to give the student an appreciation of music by exposing them to many musical styles, composers, historical trends, as well as increasing their aural, verbal and writing skills in describing music.

Through two lessons and four activities, students learn about nanotechnology, its extreme smallness, and its vast and growing applications in our world. Embedded within the unit is a broader introduction to the field of material science and engineering and its vital role in nanotechnology advancement. Engaging mini-lab activities on ferrofluids, quantum dots and gold nanoparticles introduce students to specific fields within nanoscience and help them understand key concepts as the basis for thinking about engineering and everyday applications that use next-generation technology nanotechnology.

In order to assist educators with the implementation of the Common Core, the New York State Education Department provides curricular modules in P-12 English Language Arts and Mathematics that schools and districts can adopt or adapt for local purposes. The full year of Algebra I curriculum is available below.

In order to assist educators with the implementation of the Common Core, the New York State Education Department provides curricular modules in P-12 English Language Arts and Mathematics that schools and districts can adopt or adapt for local purposes. The Geometry curriculum is available below.

Through this unit, students act as engineers who are given the challenge to design laparoscopic surgical tools. After learning about human anatomy and physiology of the abdominopelvic cavity, especially as it applies to laparoscopic surgery, students learn about the mechanics of elastic solids, which is the most basic level of material behavior. Then, they explore the world of fluids and learn how fluids react to forces. Next, they combine their understanding of the mechanics of solids and fluids to understand viscoelastic materials, such as those found in the human body. Finally, they learn about tissue mechanics, including how collagen, elastin and proteoglycans give body tissues their unique characteristics. In the culminating hands-on activity, student teams design their own prototypes of laparoscopic surgical robots remotely controlled, camera-toting devices that must fit through small incisions, inspect organs and tissue for disease, obtain biopsies, and monitor via ongoing wireless image-taking. They use a (homemade) synthetic abdominal cavity simulator to test and iterate the prototype devices.

OER Passport is a professional development program that takes educators through the process of understanding, finding, developing and sharing Open Educational Resources.
This course trains teachers and students on OER use, reuse, licensing, creation, and sharing by completing the following tasks. The first three tasks lay a solid foundation and provide teachers with the tools to complete the last three tasks which focus on the use, reuse, production, and innovative teaching practices.
Participants can complete the tasks online. There are also files to print/create physical copies of OER Passports that can be used in an offline environment.

The aim of the Open Education Design - Course for Practitioners is to equip the participants with basic knowledge, practical advice and hands-on experience to prepare them for their own design of Open Educational Resources (OER).

During the 5-day course, the participants became familiar with open education design processes, methods and tools. They learned from OER experts and practitioners how to align open education with developmental and strategic goals, they got basic knowledge about OE concepts, about pedagogical and didactical issues as well as about content related issues in OE.

To empower the participants for making a crucial step from an idea to the implementation of concrete OERs, platforms and tools for open education design was addressed, followed with hands-on experience and a session on OER evaluation.

Students learn about the human body's system components, specifically its sensory systems, nervous system and brain, while comparing them to robot system components, such as sensors and computers. The unit's life sciences-to-engineering comparison is accomplished through three lessons and five activities. The important framework of "stimulus-sensor-coordinator-effector-response" is introduced to show how it improves our understanding the cause-effect relationships of both systems. This framework reinforces the theme of the human body as a system from the perspective of an engineer. This unit is the second of a series, intended to follow the Humans Are Like Robots unit.

Through a series of four lessons, students are introduced to many factors that affect the power output of photovoltaic (PV) solar panels. Factors such as the angle of the sun, panel temperature, specific circuit characteristics, and reflected radiation determine the efficiency of solar panels. These four lessons are paired with hands-on activities in which students design, build and test small photovoltaic systems. Students collect their own data, and examine different variables to determine their effects on the efficiency of PV panels to generate electrical power.

Physical Geography, also called earth science, is the study of our home planet and all of its components: its lands, waters, atmosphere, and interior. In this book, some chapters are devoted to the processes that shape the lands and impact people. Other chapters depict the processes of the atmosphere and its relationship to the planet’s surface and all our living creatures. For as long as people have been on the planet, humans have had to live within Earth’s boundaries. Now human life is having a profound effect on the planet. Several chapters are devoted to the effect people have on the planet.The journey to better understanding Earth begins here with an exploration of how scientists learn about the natural world and introduces you to the study of physical geography and earth science.

From drinking fountains at playgrounds, water systems in homes, and working bathrooms at schools to hydraulic bridges and levee systems, fluid mechanics are an essential part of daily life. Fluid mechanics, the study of how forces are applied to fluids, is outlined in this unit as a sequence of two lessons and three corresponding activities. The first lesson provides a basic introduction to Pascal's law, Archimedes' principle and Bernoulli's principle and presents fundamental definitions, equations and problems to solve with students, as well as engineering applications. The second lesson provides a basic introduction to above-ground storage tanks, their pervasive use in the Houston Ship Channel, and different types of storage tank failure in major storms and hurricanes. The unit concludes with students applying what they have learned to determine the stability of individual above-ground storage tanks given specific storm conditions so they can analyze their stability in changing storm conditions, followed by a project to design their own storage tanks to address the issues of uplift, displacement and buckling in storm conditions.

This open course for Plants, Society, and the Environment was created under a Round Six ALG Textbook Transformation Grant. Topics include cell structure, photosynthesis, taxonomy, biomes, domestication, agriculture, and medicine.