This course is an exploration of visual art forms and their cultural connections across historical periods, designed for the student with little experience in the visual arts. It includes brief studies in art history, and in-depth inquiry into the elements, media and methods used in a wide range of creative processes. At the beginning of this course, you will learn a five-step system for developing an understanding of visual art in all forms, based on:

1. Description: A work of art from an objective point of view – its physical attributes and formal construction.

2. Analysis: A detailed look at a work of art that combines physical attributes with subjective statements based on the viewer's reaction to the work.

3. Context: Historical, religious or environmental information that surrounds a particular work of art and which helps to understand the work's meaning.

4. Meaning: A statement of the work's content. A message or narrative expressed by the subject matter.

5. Judgment: A critical point of view about a work of art concerning its aesthetic or cultural value.

After completing this course, you will be able to interpret works of art based on this five-step system; explain the processes involved in artistic production; identify the many kinds of issues that artists examine in their work; and explain the role and effect of the visual arts in different social, historical and cultural contexts.

Keith Tierney updated and enhanced this work in 2018 based on an adaptation of Business Law and the Legal Environment by the Saylor Academy.

Accounting is the language of business. If you are learning accounting for the first time, embracing its foundational concepts may be challenging. Mastery of accounting primarily rests in your ability to critically think through and synthesize the information as it applies to a given situation. You should approach the learning of accounting the same way you would approach learning a foreign language; it will take time and practice to ensure you remember the concepts.
Many sub-disciplines fall under the umbrella of accounting, but this course will focus on financial accounting. Accounting as a business discipline can be viewed as a system of compiled data. Data should not be confused with information. In accounting, data is the raw transactions or business activity that happens within any business entity. For example, if someone uses $30,000 of their savings to start a business, that is a point of data. Now that you have this data, what will you do with it? Of course, the answer is accounting!

This course will introduce you to financial accounting in preparation for more advanced business topics. Recording financial information in a standard format allows managers, investors, lenders, stakeholders, and regulators to make appropriate decisions. In this course, we will look at the Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Statement of Cash Flows, and Statement of Shareholders' Equity. You will learn how to compile and analyze these financial statements from the accounting data you have created.

An examination of how companies manage processes to produce the products or services required by their customers, including product design, supply chain management, quality, inventory, and planning.
This course includes the following units:

Unit 1: Overview of Operations Management
Unit 2: Operations Strategy
Unit 3: Product Design and Process Selection
Unit 4: Supply Chain Management (SCM)
Unit 5: Just-In-Time and Lean Systems
Unit 6: Capacity Planning and Facility Layout
Unit 7: Work Systems Design
Unit 8: Inventory
Unit 9: Quality Management

This textbook is meant to accompany a course on Business Computer Information Systems. it covers the history and conteporary state of affairs, and goes in depth on Microsoft Excel uses and functions.

This course systematically examines the elements of an effective speech and goes through an element-by-element examination of the essentials of public speaking, while also identifying traits of the individual speaker and how they affect preparation and presentation. This course also demonstrates specific, performance-oriented aspects of public speaking. The themes of information and ethics tie these elements together and are emphasized in every part of the course because they are vitally important to all communicators.

Calculus is among the most important and useful developments of human thought. Even though it is over 300 years old, it is still considered the beginning and cornerstone of modern mathematics. It is a wonderful, beautiful, and useful set of ideas and techniques. You will see the fundamental ideas of this course over and over again in future courses in mathematics as well as in all of the sciences (like physics, biology, social sciences, economics, and engineering). However, calculus is an intellectual step up from your previous mathematics courses. Many of the ideas you will gain in this course are more carefully defined and have both a functional and a graphical meaning. Some of the algorithms are quite complicated, and in many cases, you will need to make a decision as to which appropriate algorithm to use. Calculus offers a huge variety of applications and many of them will be saved for courses you might take in the future.

This course is divided into five learning sections, or units, plus a reference section, or appendix. The course begins with a unit that provides a review of algebra specifically designed to help and prepare you for the study of calculus. The second unit discusses functions, graphs, limits, and continuity. Understanding limits could not be more important, as that topic really begins the study of calculus. The third unit introduces and explains derivatives. With derivatives, we are now ready to handle all of those things that change mentioned above. The fourth unit makes visual sense of derivatives by discussing derivatives and graphs. The fifth unit introduces and explains antiderivatives and definite integrals. Finally, the reference section provides a large collection of reference facts, geometry, and trigonometry that will assist you in solving calculus problems long after the course is over.

Economists divide their discipline into two areas of study: microeconomics and macroeconomics. In this course, we introduce you to the principles of macroeconomics, the study of how a country's economy works, while trying to discern among good, better, and best choices for improving and maintaining a nation's standard of living and level of economic and societal well-being. Historical and contemporary perspectives on the role of government policy surround questions of who gains and loses within a small set of key interdependent players. These beneficiaries include households, consumers, savers, firm owners, investors, government officials, and global trading partners.
Consider how microeconomists and macroeconomists analyze price fluctuations. In microeconomics, we focus on how supply and demand determine prices in a given market. In macroeconomics, we focus on changes in the price level across all markets. Microeconomics studies firm profit maximization, output optimization, consumer utility maximization, and consumption optimization. Macroeconomics studies economic growth, price stability, and full employment.

Macroeconomic performance relies on measures of economic activity, such as variables and data at the national level, within a specific period of time. Macroeconomics analyzes aggregate measures, such as national income, national output, unemployment and inflation rates, and business cycle fluctuations. In this course, we prompt you to think about the national and global issues we face, consider competing views, and draw conclusions from various perspectives, tools, and alternatives.

Foundations of Management Information Systems by Emese Felvegi; OpenStax; University of Minnesota Libraries; and Saylor Academy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Chapter 1: Introducing Psychology
Chapter 2: Psychological Science
Chapter 3: Brains, Bodies, and Behavior
Chapter 4: Sensing and Perceiving
Chapter 5: States of Consciousness
Chapter 6: Growing and Developing
Chapter 7: Learning
Chapter 8: Remembering and Judging
Chapter 9: Intelligence and Language
Chapter 10: Emotions and Motivations
Chapter 11: Personality
Chapter 12: Defining Psychological Disorders
Chapter 13: Treating Psychological Disorders
Chapter 14: Psychology in Our Social Lives

This book is meant to be a textbook for a standard one-semester introductory statistics course for
general education students. Our motivation for writing it is twofold: 1.) to provide a low-cost
alternative to many existing popular textbooks on the market; and 2.) to provide a quality textbook
on the subject with a focus on the core material of the course in a balanced presentation.
The high cost of textbooks has spiraled out of control in recent years. The high frequency at which
new editions of popular texts appear puts a tremendous burden on students and faculty alike, as well
as the natural environment. Against this background we set out to write a quality textbook with
materials such as examples and exercises that age well with time and that would therefore not
require frequent new editions. Our vision resonates well with the publisher’s business model which
includes free digital access, reduced paper prints, and easy customization by instructors if additional
material is desired.

In a technology-driven environment, we assume most people are comfortable learning online. The ubiquity of digital communication, automated assistance, and constant connectivity support this assumption, but many of us lack the skills needed to navigate digital resources and technologies in an academic setting. Learning in a Digital Age (LiDA) is a credit-bearing course designed to improve digital learning literacies for higher education and help learners gain more value from open educational resources (OER).

In this course, you will develop the digital and learning literacies to maximize their learning in a contemporary digital learning environment for higher education. You will develop the academic skills to discern the credibility, accuracy, and integrity of open access resources available on the Internet and corresponding digital tools to research, analyze, and present information for academic purposes.

You will also develop competence in a range of digital tools, including social media, communication and collaboration tools, and publishing tools to support learning in contemporary society. This will include knowledge of copyright, open licensing, media literacy, and digital citizenship.

This course is offered concurrently in partnership with OERu. You are more than welcome to work through all four sections at your own pace, but you may be able to interact with more students if you follow the schedule used by OERu and their community of learners.

This course includes the following sections:

Digital Skills for Online Learning (LiDA101)
Digital Citizenship (LiDA102)
Open Education, Copyright, and Open Licensing in a Digital World
Critical Media Literacy and Associated Digital Skills (LiDA104)

The intended audience of the textbook is first-year undergraduates taking courses on the principles of macroeconomics and microeconomics. Many may never take another economics course. We aim to increase their economic literacy both by developing their aptitude for economic thinking and by presenting key insights about economics that every educated individual should know.

Applications ahead of Theory
We present all the theory that is standard in books on the principles of economics. But by beginning with applications, we also show students why this theory is needed.

We take the kind of material that other authors put in “applications boxes” and place it at the heart of our book. Each chapter is built around a particular business or policy application, such as (for microeconomics) minimum wages, stock exchanges, and auctions, and (for macroeconomics), social security, globalization, and the wealth and poverty of nations.

Why take this approach? Traditional courses focus too much on abstract theory relative to the interests and capabilities of the average undergraduate. Students are rarely engaged, and the formal theory is never integrated into the way students think about economic issues. We provide students with a vehicle to understand the structure of economics, and we train them how to use this structure.

Operations management is a science with which we are all, in some capacity, familiar. We all have scarce resources and have to allocate those resources properly. Think about the process of preparing a meal: you have to gather all the proper ingredients and prepare them for cooking. Certain ingredients go in at certain times. Occasionally, you fall behind or get too far ahead, jeopardizing the entire meal. And, of course, if you find that you do not have enough ingredients, even more problems arise. All of these elements of meal preparation – purchasing ingredients, prepping the ingredients by dicing them up, mixing ingredients together, boiling or baking the dish, serving, and cleaning – can be seen as parts of operations management.