Open Educational Resources in Engineering
This page provides access to open educational resources (OER) in Engineering from a variety of repositories and publishers. The purpose is to showcase content that might be of interest to faculty who are considering adopting OER for use in their classes. This list of content is by no means exhaustive and more resources are available.
Open Textbooks
Basic Engineering Science: A Systems, Accounting, and Modeling Approach by Publication Date: 2001This textbook is based on a different paradigm for organizing an engineering science core --- a systems, accounting and modeling approach --- that emphasizes the common, underlying concepts of engineering science. Although this approach is not new, as most graduate students have been struck by this idea sometime during their graduate education, its use as the organizing principle for an undergraduate curriculum is new. By focusing on the underlying concepts and stressing the similarities between subjects that are often perceived by students (and taught by faculty) as unconnected topics, this approach provides engineering students a foundational framework for recognizing and building connections as they travel through their education.
Building with Nature & Beyond: Principles for designing nature based engineering solutions by ISBN: 9789463664578Publication Date: 2021This book is based upon the edX MOOCs Engineering: Building with Nature and Beyond Engineering: Building with Nature. The Engineering: Building with Nature MOOC, explores the use of natural materials and ecological processes in achieving effective and sustainable hydraulic infrastructure designs, distilling Engineering and Ecological Design Principles. In the Beyond Engineering: Building with Nature course, the missing element of Social Design Principles is developed and taught.
Engineering Statics: Open and Interactive by Publication Date: 2020Engineering Statics is a free, open-source textbook appropriate for anyone who wishes to learn more about vectors, forces, moments, static equilibrium, and the properties of shapes. Specifically, it has been written to be the textbook for Engineering Mechanics: Statics, the first course in the Engineering Mechanics series offered in most university-level engineering programs.
This book’s content should prepare you for subsequent classes covering Engineering Mechanics: Dynamics and Mechanics of Materials. At its core, Engineering Statics provides the tools to solve static equilibrium problems for rigid bodies. The additional topics of resolving internal loads in rigid bodies and computing area moments of inertia are also included as stepping stones for later courses. We have endeavored to write in an approachable style and provide many questions, examples, and interactives for you to engage with and learn from.
Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering I by Publication Date: 2014The course focuses on the creation, manipulation, transmission, and reception of information by electronic means. Elementary signal theory; time- and frequency-domain analysis; Sampling Theorem. Digital information theory; digital transmission of analog signals; error-correcting codes.
Introduction to Industrial Engineering by ISBN: 9781648169823Publication Date: 2020This book was created for an undergraduate Introduction to Industrial Engineering course at The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). The chapters give an overview of the profession and an introduction to some of the tools used by industrial engineers in industry. There are interactive content exercises included at the end of most chapters. This interactive content aims to engage students in the content as they are reading. The book will continue to revised and updated with new information as it becomes necessary. More interactive content will be added to the end of each chapter in future versions of the book.- Introduction to Linear, Time-Invariant, Dynamic Systems for Students of Engineering by Publication Date: 2016I taught many times the college undergraduate, junior-level, one-semester course entitled “AOE 3034, Vehicle Vibration and Control” in the Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering (AOE) at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VPI & SU). I was dissatisfied using commercially available textbooks for AOE 3034, so I began writing my own course notes, and those notes grew into this book. Although this project began with preparation of informal handout notes, the completed book is a formal college engineering textbook, complete with homework problems at the end of each chapter, a detailed Table of Contents, a list of References, and a detailed Index. I hope that this book will be understandable and enlightening for students of engineering system dynamics, a valuable teaching resource for course instructors, and a useful reference for selfstudy and review.
Where to Find More
The following are dedicated search engines, repositories, and publishers hosted by organizations dedicated to open and institutions of higher education that can connect users with OER.
- LibreTextssupported by the Department of Education Open Textbook Pilot Project, the UC Davis Office of the Provost, the UC Davis Library, the California State University Affordable Learning Solutions Program, and Merlot
- The Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)from George Mason University
- MERLOTfrom California State University Long Beach
- Milne Open Textbooksfrom SUNY Geneseo
- OASISfrom SUNY Geneseo
- OER Commonsfrom ISKME
- OpenStaxfrom Rice University
- Open Textbook Libraryfrom the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
- SkillsCommonsfrom California State University Long Beach
Additional Free and Low-Cost Options
The following free and affordable resource collections lack the wider flexibility of OER, but they offer tremendous value for instructors looking to reduce the textbook cost burden on students.
Open Access (OA) Collections
arXiv > eess (Electrical Engineering and Systems Science)
Free and Low-Cost Courseware
Additional Resources
Engineering Technology: Simulations for Learning - Learning simulations covering Automation & Robotics, Electrical & Motor Control, Process Control or Renewable Energy.
Engineering Computations- This project is a collection of learning modules in engineering computations for undergraduate students. The project lead is Prof. Lorena A. Barba at the George Washington University, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department. In Fall 2017, Prof. Barba worked with doctoral student Natalia C. Clementi to produce the first three modules of the series. With student Tingyu Wang, we wrote the fourth module in 2019. We began writing Module 5 in 2020 and Module 6 in 2021. These are work-in-progress. Each learning modules is made up of several lessons, written as a Jupyter notebook, and addressing an area of application or skills in computing. We use Python as the programming language.
