The Latest Stuff…
Now FREE online: Fixing American Policing
Now FREE online: Guardian Ethics: Bushido for Law Enforcement
I’ve created a guide for conducting legal research online for free. I hope this is a valuable resource for poor souls that don’t have access to LexisNexis and other research tools.
I’ve created a new section of the site called Research Tools. The idea is to serve as a repository of short works designed to help students with research and statistics courses.
I’ve decided to work on my ongoing OER projects as online “working drafts,” which means you can watch them develop and hopefully comment as to the content, organization, errors, omissions, and so forth. So far, criminal law, criminal procedure, and criminology have been posted in draft form.
Criminal Justice
The major thrust of my work is criminal justice, with an emphasis on policing and research. I teach the following courses and have developed OER textbooks for:
- Introduction to Criminal Justice [HTML / Print / eBook]
- Fundamental Cases in Criminal Justice [HTML / Print / eBook]
- Policing [Draft Forthcoming]
- Criminal Law [Working Draft]
- Procedural Law [Working Draft]
- Finance for Helping Professionals[HTML]
- Statistics v.1.0 [HTML]
- Research Methods [HTML]
I’m also collaborating with colleagues on some things that I do not teach on a regular basis:
- Criminology [Working Draft]
Open Educational Resources (OER)
Higher education costs have gotten out of hand, and students often struggle to make ends meet and take on mountains of debt. A major component of that is the astronomical cost of textbooks. OER materials seek to provide students with high-quality texts at no (or very little) cost.
Part of my OER efforts will be “teaching the teacher” in the use of technology to develop resources and deliver them to the masses.
Finance
My Ph.D. isn’t in economics, business, or finance, but I like to dabble in this fun and fascinating field. My criminal justice students will likely wind up in public service fields that, unfortunately, don’t pay very well. I try to help them overcome that obstacle by understanding money and investing.
I’ve developed two sets of resources in this area:
Fundamentals of Finance for Helping Professionals. This text assumes little finance and money management knowledge and provides strategies for maximizing income, minimizing spending, and controlling debt. It also provides an introduction to investing for retirement and related concepts.
Fundamentals of Market Investing. This text provides an overview of long-term investing and deals primarily with investing within the context of a tax-sheltered retirement account. The basic idea of this text is to provide a clear and concise treatment of a complex topic in plain English.