NSCC Open Textbook Catalogue

Welcome to college! Whether this is your first time in post-secondary education, or whether you are returning to studies, you’re arriving with some goals you want to achieve. Perhaps you are taking a focused program to lead you into your desired career.  Perhaps you are exploring courses in different areas, providing a foundation for future specialization.  Wherever you are in your journey, you find yourself in a learning environment that is different from one you have experienced before.

A good foundation for college is learning how to learn.  By taking the time to read this book and work through the exercises included, you are investing in the skills that will support you in all of your classes and future learning.  Successful students share a set of skills and habits in common.  The good news is that these skills are not a secret; anyone can learn the skills that support successful learning. By taking some time to learn proven study strategies, you will be able to reach your learning goals, and avoid the pitfalls that can take you off-track.

Who is this book for?

This book focuses on the skills you’ll need to be successful in undergraduate courses or other adult education classes. If you are:

• new to college studies
• returning to college after some time away
• a mature student
• an international student
• or a continuing student who wants to improve their current skills and strategies

this book is meant to support you in your journey.

The goal of this textbook is not to make you an expert. True expertise in any field is a years-long endeavor. Here I will survey some of the basic topics of chemistry. This survey should give you enough knowledge to appreciate the impact of chemistry in everyday life and, if necessary, prepare you for additional instruction in chemistry. Throughout each chapter, I present two features that reinforce the theme of the textbook—that chemistry is all around you. The first is a feature titled, appropriately, “Chemistry Is Everywhere.” Chemistry Is Everywhere” focuses on the personal hygiene products that you may use every morning: toothpaste, soap, and shampoo, among others. These products are chemicals, aren’t they? Ever wonder about the chemical reactions that they undergo to give you clean and healthy teeth or shiny hair? I will explore some of these chemical reactions in future chapters. But this feature makes it clear that chemistry is, indeed, everywhere. The other feature focuses on chemistry that you likely indulge in every day: eating and drinking. In the “Food and Drink App,” I discuss how the chemistry of the chapter applies to things that you eat and drink every day. Carbonated beverages depend on the behavior of gases, foods contain acids and bases, and we actually eat certain rocks. (Can you guess which rocks without looking ahead?) Cooking, eating, drinking, and metabolism—we are involved with all these chemical processes all the time. These two features allow us to see the things we interact with every day in a new light—as chemistry.

In this survey text, directed at those not majoring in biology, we dispel the assumption that a little learning is a dangerous thing. We hope that by skimming the surface of a very deep subject, biology, we may inspire you to drink more deeply and make more informed choices relating to your health, the environment, politics, and the greatest subject that are all of us are entwined in, life itself.

NSCC Human Biology by Rhea Langille is a condensed and adapted version of the open textbook Concepts of Biology—1st Canadian Edition by Charles Molnar and Jane Gair. Concepts of Biology—1st Canadian Edition is an adaptation of Concepts of Biology created by Rice University & OpenStax.

Introductory Business Statistics with Interactive Spreadsheets – 1st Canadian Edition is an adaptation of Thomas K. Tiemann’s book, Introductory Business Statistics. This new edition still contains the basic ideas behind statistics, such as populations, samples, the difference between data and information, and sampling distributions as well as information on descriptive statistics and frequency distributions, normal and t-distributions, hypothesis testing, t-tests, f-tests, analysis of variance, non-parametric tests, and regression basics. New topics include the chi-square test and categorical variables, null and alternative hypotheses for the test of independence, simple linear regression model, least squares method, coefficient of determination, confidence interval for the average of the dependent variable, and prediction interval for a specific value of the dependent variable.

This new edition also allows readers to learn the basic and most commonly applied statistical techniques in business in an interactive way — when using the web version — through interactive Excel spreadsheets. For each topic, a customized interactive template has been created within which selected values can be repeatedly changed to observe how the entire process, as well as the outcomes, are automatically adjusted.

Also, in this adapted edition, the real-world examples throughout the text, and the information in general, have been revised to reflect Canadian content.

This book is designed to help students organize their thinking about psychology at a conceptual level. The focus on behaviour and empiricism has produced a text that is better organized, has fewer chapters, and is somewhat shorter than many of the leading books. The beginning of each section includes learning objectives; throughout the body of each section are key terms in bold followed by their definitions in italics; key takeaways, and exercises and critical thinking activities end each section.

To facilitate learning outcomes, three techniques have been used:

1. Chapter openers.The focus on behaviour begins each chapter with an opener showcasing an interesting real-world example of people who are dealing with behavioural questions and who can use psychology to help them answer those questions. The opener is designed to draw the student into the chapter and create an interest in learning about the topic.
2. Psychology in everyday life.Each chapter contains one or two features designed to link the principles from the chapter to real-world applications in business, environment, health, law, learning, and other relevant domains. For instance, the application in Chapter 7 “Growing and Developing” — “What Makes a Good Parent?” — applies the concepts of parenting styles in a mini handbook about parenting, and the application in Chapter 4, “Brains, Bodies, and Behaviour,” is about the difficulties that left-handed people face performing everyday tasks in a right-handed world.
3. Research focus.Empiricism is also emphasized throughout, but without making it a distraction from the main story line. Each chapter presents one or more close-ups on research — well-articulated and specific examples of research within the content area, each including a summary of the hypotheses, methods, results, and interpretations. This feature provides a continuous thread that reminds students of the importance of empirical research. The research foci also emphasize the fact that findings are not always predictable ahead of time (dispelling the myth of hindsight bias) and help students understand how research really works.

In short, the authors  have attempted to bring psychology to life in ways that really matter to students while, at the same time, maintaining content and conceptual rigor, with a strong focus on the fundamental principles of empiricism and the scientific method.

Algebra and Trigonometry provides a comprehensive exploration of algebraic principles and meets scope and sequence requirements for a typical introductory algebra and trigonometry course. The modular approach and the richness of content ensure that the book meets the needs of a variety of courses. Algebra and Trigonometry offers a wealth of examples with detailed, conceptual explanations, building a strong foundation in the material before asking students to apply what they’ve learned.