If you’re interested in free textbooks – of either the Sociology or Psychology variety – you may well have come across the Openstax Introduction to Sociology textbook published by Lumen Learning.
And if you haven’t Openstax is an example of a growing field in education called OER (Open Educational Resources). These are resources created by educational institutions, companies and individuals that are given away under a Create Commons license to anyone who wants to use them. In this particular instance the Openstax CC license allows anyone to take the basic text and change it in any way they want to meet the needs of their particular students.
While the basic textbook is widely available online there aren’t that many free resources to accompany it. And while this isn’t an insurmountable problem – teachers are obviously well-used to making their own resource materials – it can help if you’ve got something to fall back on. This is where Luman Learning’s free PowerPoint Presentations come into the picture.
Each module runs to around 35 – 40 slides and while, as you can see from the screenshot, the slides are what one might charitably describe as “functional” they do the job.
Whatever that job might be.
One advantage of having such a basic set of slides is, of course, that you can easily edit them, either to make them a bit more attractive / less text intensive or to add / subtract information.
Having said that, these are something of a gift horse and, as we know from bitter experience, we should look into a gift horse’s mouth.
Or something.
Anyway, there are 18 different modules from which to choose and you can either download them individually (if there are some you don’t teach / need):
Or if you fancy having the lot then you can download them in a Single Big Batch.
