Criminal Law uses a two-step process to augment learning, called the applied approach. First, after building a strong foundation from scratch, Criminal Law introduces you to crimes and defenses that have been broken down into separate components. It is so much easier to memorize and comprehend the subject matter when it is simplified this way. However, becoming proficient in the law takes more than just memorization. You must be trained to take the laws you have studied and apply them to various fact patterns. Most students are expected to do this automatically, but application must be seen, experienced, and practiced before it comes naturally. Thus the second step of the applied approach is reviewing examples of the application of law to facts after dissecting and analyzing each legal concept. Some of the examples come from cases, and some are purely fictional. All the examples are memorable, even quirky, so they will stick in your mind and be available when you need them the most (like during an exam). After a few chapters, you will notice that you no longer obsess over an explanation that doesn’t completely make sense the first time you read it—you will just skip to the example. The examples clarify the principles for you, lightening the workload significantly.

Introduces faculty to Open Educational Resources and planning resources for OER adoption. In this course, participants will be introduced to the meaning Open, laws surrounding the distribution of educational content, and how to find openly licensed materials for use in a class. Participants will apply concepts to the creation of a mini module in their discipline.

This resource was created at the University of Maryland (UMD) for instructors who want to develop open educational textbook resources. You may use this template and modify the text and format to fit your open educational resources (OER) needs, whether that is a complete textbook or a single chapter of information. The purpose of this resource is to provide a flexible and free resource for instructors that can promote and facilitate the creation and use of open educational resources.

We teach open science and have used this template to create an OER introduction to statistics textbook (Numbers don't lie (but people do), https://sites.google.com/umd.edu/statisticsinsocialsciences/home), an OER R textbook (Learning R the EZ way, https://sites.google.com/umd.edu/ezlearning-r/home), and an undergraduate research dissemination textbook (Addressing Grand Challenges through open science research, https://sites.google.com/umd.edu/umd-open-science-research/home?authuser=0). We hope others will find this resource useful as well.