Traditional textbooks are expensive. VMI’s Department of Applied Mathematics recognizes this fact, and starting in the mid-2000s, has been a leader in a nationwide effort to make textbooks more affordable by contributing heavily to the Open Educational Resource (OER) community.

The majority of texts required in our courses can be obtained for free as a PDF document. Students never need to sell these texts back to the bookstore, and updates to each text are easily obtained. Print versions of these texts are also available for a very low cost in the bookstore if a student wishes to purchase a physical copy.

Further, many of these texts were written by VMI faculty. While these texts are also in use at other colleges and universities around the world, they have been written with the needs of our cadets in mind. Contact Col. Greg Hartman, hartmangn@vmi.edu, for PDFs of these texts.

Currently, the following classes use OER texts. (Courses marked with * signify the text was written by VMI faculty.)

• *MA 101 - Math That Matters I: Introductory Mathematical Modeling
• *MA 102 – Math That Matters II: Math That Matters 2
• *MA 103 – Matrix Algebra: Fundamentals of Matrix Algebra
• *MA 110 – Mathematical Software: An Introduction to Matlab and Mathcad
• *MA 114 – Precalculus: Precalculus
• *MA 123 – Calculus and Analytic Geometry 1: APEX Calculus
• *MA 124 – Calculus and Analytic Geometry 2: APEX Calculus
• *MA 215 – Calculus and Analytic Geometry 3: APEX Calculus
• *MA 220 – Probability and Statistics for Scientists and Engineers: Statistics for Scientists and Engineers
• MA 305 – Linear Algebra
• MA 310 – Matlab Programming
• *MA 311 – Elementary Differential Equations: Exploring Differential Equations
• *MA 432 – Numerical Analysis: Numerical Analysis