Welcome to the University of Arkansas Open Educational Resources (OER). The openly licensed textbooks included in this collection were jointly funded by the University Libraries and Global Campus through the OER Course Materials Conversion Program. All included resources may be freely used by the public.
The materials housed in ScholarWorks have been created through a variety of tools. Most of our OERs are created using the Pressbooks publishing platform and may be found at https://uark.pressbooks.pub/
Questions about our resources? Email us, oer@uark.edu.
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Simulation Modeling and Arena
Manuel D. Rossetti
Discrete-event simulation is an important tool for the modeling of complex systems. Simulation is used to represent manufacturing, transportation, and service systems in a computer program to perform experiments on a computer. Simulation modeling involves elements of system modeling, computer programming, probability and statistics, and engineering design. Simulation Modeling and Arena, by Dr. Manuel Rossetti, is an introductory textbook for a first course in discrete-event simulation modeling and analysis for upper-level undergraduate students as well as entering graduate students. The text is focused on engineering students (primarily industrial engineering); however, the text is also appropriate for advanced business majors, computer science majors, and other disciplines where simulation is practiced. Practitioners interested in learning simulation and Arena could also use this book independently of a course.
This book was created in Markdown and is available through GitHub. By cloning the repository or downloading the zip archive, you can have a local copy of the entire book. Thus, if you do not have regular access to internet services, you can still read and utilize the materials. The author encourages students within a class setting to clone the repository using a program such as Github desktop.
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Signals and Systems
Jingxian Wu
Signals and Systems is a core Electrical Engineering undergraduate course. This course covers the topics of signal and system analysis, with an emphasis on the analysis of linear time-invariant systems. The materials presented in this course are designed for a 15-week course for junior or senior level students. The open access materials for this course include:
Course outline and guides: a detailed guideline that provides a week-by-week teaching schedule for a 15-week semester.
Lecture notes: a complete set of lecture notes with detailed explanations and a large number of examples that cover all the contents that are offered in this course.
Homeworks: 14 homework assignments with solution manuals. The solution manual is available to verified university instructors upon request.
Lab manual: the lab manual contains a 4-section tutorial on how to use Matlab, the engineering programming language, and detailed procedures of 8 labs throughout the semester.
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Astronomy for Educators
Daniel E. Barth
Astronomy for Educators provides new and accomplished K-12 instructors with concepts and projects for low-cost, high-impact STEM classroom instruction that is built around the National Academies National Research Council's K-12 Framework for Science Education.
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University Physics I: Classical Mechanics
Julio Gea-Banacloche
This is a textbook for the first semester of University Physics for scientists and engineers. It covers classical mechanics, and a brief introduction to thermodynamics. The presentation and approach are similar to Mazur’s “The Principles and Practice of Physics,” in that conservation laws are introduced before forces, and one-dimensional systems thoroughly covered before moving to two dimensions. Although the course is “calculus based,” the book has been written with the understanding that many students may be taking calculus simultaneously as a corequisite, so the use of calculus is relatively sparse.
This revised version (Fall 2019) takes into account a number of student suggestions. it has more worked out examples, and also a few more problems; the material in Chapters 8 and 9 has been slightly rearranged, so that now rotational kinematics is part of Chapter 8 (“Motion in two dimensions”); and the chapters on gravity and waves, 10 and 12, have been simplified a bit (particularly 12). Some of the more advanced examples from the first version have now been labeled “Advanced Topics,” so students should know that they can skip them if they want to. Several typos have been corrected as well.
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Open Technical Writing: An Open-Access Text for Instruction in Technical and Professional Writing
Adam Rex Pope
This book presents technical writing as an approach to researching and carrying out writing that centers on technical subject matter. Each and every chapter is devoted to helping students understand that good technical writing is situationally-aware and context-driven. Technical writing doesn’t work off knowing the one true right way of doing things—there is no magic report template out there that will always work. Instead, the focus is on offering students a series of approaches they can use to map out their situations and do research accordingly.
