Book Title: Unified Approach to Electricity and Magnetism

I’ve taught PHY2049 at UNF since 2014 (on 12 different semesters). I moved from using an expensive textbook to an OER textbook (OpenStax) around 2016-2017. The main focus of this class is on concepts related to electricity and magnetism, which by the end of the 19th century was unified as two aspects of the same phenomenon. All available textbooks for this class (there’s many out there) including the available open source texts, treat these concepts as a set of independent topics – giving very little (if any) insight to the now well-understood unified theory of electromagnetism.

During the Pandemic I began to reformulate this class with an emphasis on the unified nature of electromagnetism with the intention to provide the students a strong intuitive grasp of the subject. Without any available textbooks at the appropriate level that supports this “Unified Approach” to electricity and magnetism, I severed ties with all textbooks and started to build a content library of video lectures. These video lectures served as a “video textbook” and I started implementing this in Summer of 2020. These content videos provided the backbone for this “Unified Approach to PHY2049” that was offered in the Spring 2021 and Summer 2021 semesters as well as the current Fall 2021 semester. These offerings have been completely free to the students (without any textbook and other costs). Moreover, the data gathered from the Spring 2021 and Summer 2021 offerings of this “Unified Approach” to PHY2049 (based on a nationally implemented testing tool) shows a distinct normalized gain in the learning outcomes compared to that of the traditional approach commonly used for this course (and followed by all available textbooks).