Catalog

Financial Empowerment is an adaptation of the openly licensed textbook Personal Finance, v. 1.0 which was adapted by Saylor Academy (2012) under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License without attribution as requested by the work’s original creator or licensee and is available here: http://www.saylor.org/site/textbooks/.

The purpose of the Financial Empowerment adaptation is to take an accessible, student-focused, personal finance textbook from the United States and make it affordable and relevant for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada. While many mainstream Canadian personal finance texts provide excellent content in terms of the mechanics of personal finance, they are expensive and not always relevant to the values and experiences of students in the classroom. Many mainstream personal finance texts fall short for Indigenous Canadians and non-Indigenous Canadians alike because they do not speak to the varied backgrounds, knowledge systems, and experiences of their readers. This textbook was adapted in order to motivate a broad range of students to learn about personal finance.

The specific goals of this textbook are:

1. to help students build a solid understanding of personal finance in order to achieve financial literacy and financial success by providing them with the skills and knowledge necessary to navigate short and long-term financial change;
2. to tailor the content for a Canadian audience by providing Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives on personal finance and financial planning using examples and information from the Canadian financial system and economy;
3. to increase accessibility to financial education resources for students and general public alike regardless of where they live or study;
4. to customize the content for Indigenous students in Canada and address student needs for practical and theoretical knowledge on financial decision-making and financial risk assessment; and
5. to connect financial literacy with Indigenous Knowledge and history by threading Indigenous perspectives and interviews with Elders and other community leaders throughout the textbook.

Leadership and Influencing Change in Nursing is designed for a single-semester introduction to the professional nurse’s leadership role as both a care provider and a formal leader. Nursing students will take this course in their third year as they prepare to assume a professional nursing role within the clinical health care environment. An assortment of authors with diverse nursing leadership roles across Saskatchewan and Canada have contributed to this textbook. These diverse voices are focused on providing student nurses with the foundational tools, techniques, and knowledge required to empower them to meet the leadership challenges found within the incessantly changing Canadian health care environment. Assembling this information using an online format allows for the material to be updated regularly so as to keep pace with the rapid expansion of knowledge.

The specific goals of this textbook are:

1. to ensure the information is relevant to Saskatchewan nursing students,
2. to tailor the content to nursing students’ needs for both practical knowledge and theoretical knowledge,
3. to provide up-to-date evidence-informed content on nursing leadership,
4. to thread Aboriginal content throughout the textbook, and
5. to tailor the textbook to the curriculum.

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. 

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.