Catalog

The Saskatchewan Polytechnic Open Education OER by Discipline Directory lists a wide range of open educational resources organized by academic programs available at Saskatchewan Polytechnic. OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that, through permissions granted by the copyright holder, allow others to use, distribute, keep, or make changes to them. This directory is updated as new resources are identified.

Disinformation: Dealing with the Disaster is an accompaniment to an online course with the same title. The first four chapters provide an overview of fundamental concepts and phenomena that have led us to our current online information environment. Chapter 1, Information Disorder, examines information and its evolution, looking briefly at historical and contemporary trends in the areas of misinformation, disinformation, online propaganda and more. Chapter 2, Information Distribution, provides a simple overview of the news industry including journalism and editing, as well as the progression of fake news–a politicized concept which is leading us into a post-truth world. Chapter 3, Information Automation, takes readers through the automatic aspects of information exploration, examining search engines, algorithms, and associated concepts. Chapter 4, Information Manipulation, explores human interactions with information, focusing on how humans share, consume, and interact with information on social media. Each chapter provides the reader with a base level of a specific literacy (information, media, digital and meta) making them better equipped to confront disinformation. The final chapter provides readers with various frameworks and tools for effectively evaluating information and suggests that readers integrate them into their online search behaviors. 

This Pressbooks Guide builds on information provided in the Pressbooks User Guide published by Pressbooks.com. It follows the steps an author might take to create or modify an open educational resource (OER) in Pressbooks. Each chapter points readers to the pertinent chapters in the Pressbooks User Guide, provides any additional information, and includes instructions specific to post-secondary faculty and staff working in Saskatchewan Polytechnic.

The use of open education is growing and has become a global movement. Across much of North America, most post-secondary institutions are in the process of integrating the use of open education resources into teaching and learning activities. The following are the chapters covered in the guide:

• Chapter 1 starts with very basic information on the definition and description of what constitutes OER.
• Chapter 2 introduces the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by providing a brief listing of each goal.
• Chapter 3  focuses on commercial word processing tool options.
• Chapter 4 describes a number of open-source word processing and additional tools.
• Chapter 5 introduces the basic open-source TeX-based systems that arose out of the open-source software movement.
• Chapter 6 delves further into TeX-based open-source tools by highlighting some packages useful for content creation.
• Chapter 7 describes other TeX-based tools helpful for creating open content.
• Chapter 8 introduces the emerging OER tools Pressbooks, EdTech Books and LibreTexts.