Open Education Practices

Accessible Appalachia: An Open-Access Introduction to Appalachian Studies edited by Dr. Lisa Day and Jacob Johnson is an edited collection of original scholarship. The textbook offers an interdisciplinary perspective and is ideal for introductory classes in Appalachian Studies. Available free to students everywhere, this textbook features coverage of Appalachian artistic, cultural, historical, natural, and social development.

The original chapters in this work are openly licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and are freely available for reuse or adoption.

The Commons: Tools for Reading, Writing, and Rhetoric gives instructors and students of college writing courses a single source for information on metacognitive critical reading, rhetorical awareness, and MLA formatting basics as well as interesting and relevant reading and viewing content. Its approach is interdisciplinary, bringing in material from ecology, sociology, psychology, technology, popular culture, political science, cultural studies, and literature. 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 and our need to communicate and connect with one another.

Critical Belief Analysis for Security Studies by Barnet Feingold and Michael Collier is a companion volume to Security Analysis: A Critical-Thinking Approach. Critical Belief Analysis (CBA) is an emerging analytic technique for describing, explaining, and predicting decisions and actions of agents (actors, believers, decision-makers). CBA provides analysts a deeper understanding of agents’ points of view, assumptions, and the webs of belief supporting those points of view and assumptions. CBA also provides a framework for analysts to assess the quality of their final analytic efforts. While this volume is adapted to security studies and foreign policy analysis, the techniques included apply to any social science field analyzing agent decisions and actions. Included is the theoretical foundations of CBA, a CBA user’s manual, and example CBA of the U.S. 2003 decision to invade Iraq.

Security Analysis: A Critical-Thinking Approach by Michael Collier is for anyone desiring to learn techniques for generating the best answers to complex questions and best solutions to complex problems. It furnishes current and future analysts in national security, homeland security, law enforcement, and corporate security an alternative, comprehensive process for conducting both intelligence analysis and policy analysis. The target audience is upper-division undergraduate students and new graduate students, along with entry-level practitioner trainees. The book centers on a Security Analysis Critical-Thinking Framework that synthesizes critical-thinking and existing analytic techniques. Ample examples are provided to assist readers in comprehending the material. Newly created material includes techniques for analyzing beliefs and political cultures. The book also functions as an introduction to Foreign Policy and Security Studies.

Slavery to Liberation: The African American Experience 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. It offers sound interdisciplinary analysis of selected historical and contemporary issues surrounding the origins and manifestations of White supremacy in the United States. By placing race at the center of the work, the book offers significant lessons for understanding the institutional marginalization of Blacks in contemporary America and their historical resistance and perseverance.