Open Education Practices

Ancient and Modern: The African Experience (2025), edited by Ogechi Anyanwu et al., is written in clear, accessible language by accomplished and emerging Africanists in diverse fields who span generations of experts in Africa and the Diaspora. The collection presents the dynamic cultural, economic, historical, human, physical, political, and social developments shaping the present and future of Africa and Africans in the Diaspora—a significant focus of African Studies curricula. It is released under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 Creative Commons License. *FUNDING: This work was funded by a generous grant from the EKU Board of Regents *

Critical Belief Analysis for Security Studies (2025), by Barnet Feingold and Michael Collier, is a companion volume to Security Analysis: A Critical-Thinking Approach (2023). Critical Belief Analysis (CBA) is an emerging analytic technique for describing, explaining, and predicting decisions and actions of agents. It provides analysts a deeper understanding of agents’ points of view, assumptions, and the webs of belief supporting those points of view and assumptions. The techniques apply to any social science field analyzing agent decisions and actions. The theoretical foundations of CBA, a CBA user’s manual, and example CBA of the U.S. 2003 decision to invade Iraq are included. This work is openly licensed under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 Creative Commons License.

Life From Within: Poems by Elizabeth Madox Roberts (2024), a student co-creation project in Dr. Erin Presley's graduate textual studies seminar, explores the previously unpublished manuscripts of Kentucky poet Elizabeth Madox Roberts, housed in EKU Library's Special Collections and Archives. **Note: Librarians are working to create an accessible version of this text which the students chose to build in Google Sites.

Accessible Appalachia: An Open-Access Introduction to Appalachian Studies (2024), edited by Dr. Lisa Day and Jacob Johnson, is a collection of original scholarship on the artistic, cultural, historical, natural, and social development of Appalachia. The interdisciplinary textbook is ideal for introductory classes in Appalachian Studies. This work is openly licensed under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 Creative Commons License. *FUNDING: This work was funded by a generous grant from the EKU Board of Regents, with additional funding from EKU Libraries*

The Commons: Tools for Reading, Writing, and Rhetoric(2024), edited by Dr. Jill Parrott, Dr. Dom Ashby, and Jonathon Collins, gives instructors and students of college writing courses a single, interdisciplinary source for information on metacognitive critical reading, rhetorical awareness, and MLA formatting basics. Each essay, website, video, infographic, and poem has been carefully chosen to speak to the Eastern Kentucky University community, but everyone can find something that speaks to our common human experience. This work is openly licensed under a CC-BY Creative Commons License. *FUNDING: This work was funded by a generous grant from the EKU Board of Regents*

Security Analysis: A Critical-Thinking Approach (2023), by Michael Collier, is written for anyone desiring to learn techniques for generating the best solutions to complex problems. It furnishes current and future analysts in national security, homeland security, law enforcement, and corporate security a comprehensive process for conducting both intelligence analysis and policy analysis, and can be used as an introduction to Foreign Policy and Security Studies. The target audience includes upper-division undergraduate students, new graduate students, and entry-level practitioner trainees. This work is openly licensed under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 Creative Commons License.

Slavery to Liberation: The African American Experience (2019), edited by Ogechi Ayanwu, et al., gives instructors, students, and general readers a comprehensive and up-to-date account of African Americans’ cultural and political history, economic development, artistic expressiveness, and religious and philosophical worldviews in a critical framework. The book offers significant lessons for understanding the institutional marginalization of Blacks in contemporary America and their historical resistance and perseverance. This work is openly licensed under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 Creative Commons License.

The 2nd edition of Slavery to Liberation (2022), edited by Joshua Farrington, Norman W. Powell, Gwen Graham, Lisa Day, & Ogechi E. Anyanwu, updates and expands on the first edition. This work is released with a Creative Commons CC-NA license.

The SWK 340: Social Work Research Methods OER Collection is a collection of course materials that Dr. Erin Stevenson adapted from the open access textbook Scientific Inquiry in Social Work, by Dr. Matthew DeCarlo, for use in her course SWK 340 Social Work Research Methods at Eastern Kentucky University. Assignments were adapted from the original assignments suggested by textbook author Dr. Matthew DeCarlo. The course materials in this collection are released under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 Creative Commons License. For ease of adapting, materials are available as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Powerpoint documents. *FUNDING: This work was funded by a generous grant from the EKU Board of Regents*