Collections

Languages & Communications Textbooks (Licences vary)

A collection of open textbooks on different topics in communications.

Courses

Business Communications  curated and designed by Melissa Ashman (CC BY).

Students will learn how to analyze context and audience, determine purpose, message content, visual design and media in order to create written workplace messages that can be received, understood, used and retrieved with speed and accuracy.

Business Communications 2 curated and designed by Karen McMurray (CC BY).

STEM Foundations (CC BY-NC-SA).

This course offers practice using workplace communication, with activities designed to strengthen skills in preparation for entering a college program in a STEM career.

Guides

Pathways to Connection: A Facilitation Guide for Social Emotional Development and Community Engagement  by Robin Higgins (Public Domain)

This facilitation guide focuses on making and maintaining human connections through detailed lesson plans, case studies, articles, links to resources and on-line adaptations while exploring personal and cultural identity, mental health, well-being, and resilience.

Plain Language and Design for Post-Secondary  by debnielsen and worfolkm (CC BY-NC-SA)

Have you ever found yourself rereading sentences or paragraphs, trying to understand what the writer meant? Or maybe you have put off or just avoided reading a document because it seemed too complicated. This handbook will show you how to make your writing easier to understand, even when you are writing about complex topics. It will give you tips on how to make your sentences clearer and show you how to organize your documents so they are more effective for the reader.

Supplementary Materials

A Guide to Academic Podcasting by Stacey Copeland and Hannah McGregor (CC BY-NC-ND).

Academic podcasting is the communication of scholarly knowledge through the digital medium of podcasting. Podcasting can take on many forms, including interviews, audio documentary, fiction, or experimental sound forms.

WISC-Online Communication Learning Objects (CC BY-NC).

A collection of learning objects on various communication topics by various authors.

Textbooks

Communication and Teamwork Skills to Support Neurodiversity by Teagan Menhenett; Nick Milne; and Siva Krishnan (CC BY-NC).

This textbook is designed for staff and students to support the neurodiverse student body in developing two key professional practice skills: communication and teamwork skills. Neurodiversity is a spectrum, and the aim of this resource is for it to be as accessible as possible for all brains. The ultimate goal is to support students through their course experience and beyond graduation. [Published in 2025 by Deakin University.]

Communication Concepts by Erin Hawley (CC BY-NC).

Communicators everywhere are struggling to connect with diverse, distracted audiences, in both urgent and everyday contexts. In other words, communication has never been more vital, but it’s becoming harder and harder to be heard. In this book, we make sense of communication. From multiple perspectives, we unpack the practices, politics, pleasures, and problems that are activated when meaning is shared across real and virtual spaces. This book will help you use the thinking tools of communication theory to understand why communication matters and how it impacts (and is impacted by) our rapidly changing world. [Published in 2023 by Deakin University.]

Communication in Practice: An Introductory Communication Textbook by Jeremy Rose (CC BY).

This approachable and conversational textbook is intended for undergraduate communication courses. Dr. Jeremy Rose draws from an accomplished lecturing career to explore the fundamentals of communication with media examples and real world scenarios. [Published in 2025.]

Communication in the Real World: An Introduction to Communication Studies by [author removed at request of original publisher] (CC BY-NC-SA).

This book overviews the time-tested conceptual foundations of the field, while incorporating the latest research and cutting-edge applications of these basics. Each chapter will include timely, concrete, and real-life examples of communication concepts in action. As of January 2024 this resource has had 33.5 million page views, 1.2 million visitors and 59,000 downloads.

Communication Theory (CC BY-SA).

This Wikibook is an introduction to communication theory — the theory of how humans share, encode, and decode what they know, what they need, and what they expect from each other.
Communication Training and Development by William Arnold and Lynne McClure (CC BY-NC-ND)

This new edition builds on the strengths of the popular first edition, providing an interesting, practical discussion of the interrelationship between communication and the field of training and development.

Decoding Deception by Diana Daly and Kainan Jarrette (CC BY-NC-SA).

Decoding Deception  (2025) by Diana Daly and Kainan Jarrette is a dynamic multimedia OER that turns adults and college and high school students into expert lie detectors. This interactive guide blends humor, games, and activities with cognitive science and media literacy to reveal how biases, fallacies, and AI-fueled content can mislead us. Readers learn practical strategies for questioning sources, evaluating claims, and cutting through the noise of our post-truth era. [added August 2025]

Digital Photography for Graphic Communications by Richard Adams, Reem El Asaleh, Art Seto, Jason Lisi, and Martin Habekost (CC BY).

The purpose of this book is to serve as a reference for a one-semester course in digital photography for graphic communications. Since digital cameras have mostly replaced colour scanners, graphic communicators need to capture images for use in magazines, catalogs, brochures, packages, signs, banners—all forms of printed materials—and also for eBooks, web sites, and apps. It is based on a 2009 print book by the authors that was called Digital Photography for Print and published by the Printing Industries of America (PIA) Press.

Disinformation by Nina Verishagen and Diane Zerr (CC BY-NC-SA).

Disinformation: Dealing with the Disaster provides a foundational knowledge of today’s chaotic online information environment. Readers will come to understand various concerning concepts such as information overload and fake news, while engaging in discussions about familiar online entities including trolls, bots and influencers. Each chapter culminates in an important lesson about how to begin to deal with the disaster and take meaningful steps towards becoming responsible digital citizens.

A Guide to Technical Communications: Strategies & Applications by Lynn Hall & Leah Wahlin (CC BY-NC).

This open textbook was designed for Engineering Technical Communications courses at The Ohio State University.

Information Strategies for Communicators by Kathleen A. Hansen and Nora Paul (CC BY).

The definitive text for the information search and evaluation process as practiced by news and strategic communication message producers.

Interpersonal Communication: A Mindful Approach to Relationships by Jason S Wrench , Narissra M Punyanunt  and Katherine  S Thweatt  (CC BY-NC-SA).

This book helps readers examine their own one-on-one communicative interactions using a mindfulness lens and incorporating the latest communication theory and research to help students navigate everyday interpersonal interactions. The book cover topics typically taught in an undergraduate interpersonal communication course: family interactions, interpersonal dynamics, language, listening, nonverbal communication, and romantic relationships, as well as exploring emerging areas such as self-compassion, body positivity, friendships, and “the dark side”. Named a top Pressbook of 2025 with almost 240K visitors and 565K pageviews.

Introduction to Communication and Media Studies  by J.J. Sylvia IV (CC BY-NC-SA).

This textbook examines communication and media studies, covering key communication theories and illustrating how to develop information and media literacy through critical thinking and rhetorical analysis. It also discusses the historical evolution and impact of mass media until the present day. [Published in 2024 by ROTEL (Remixing Open Textbooks with an Equity Lens) Project/]

Key Concepts in Surveillance Studies edited by Guy McHendry (CC BY-NC-SA).

A student-authored glossary highlighting twenty-six key concepts in Surveillance Studies. For each concept, the student provided a concise definition of the concept that makes its connection to surveillance studies clear and provided an example.

Management Communication by Liz Dixon, Kurt Sandholtz, and Staci Smith (CC BY-SA).

From the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University, this open textbook addresses business communication which is concise, direct, clear, and compelling. Communication is the heart of business. Short emails, complex reports, private chats, impassioned pitches, formal presentations, and team meetings move information and ideas around an organization, define strategy, and drive decisions

Open Technical Communication by Tiffani Tijerina, Tamara Powell, Jonathan Arnett, Monique Logan, Cassandra Race (CC-BY) .

The resources attached to this textbook are collaboratively created by the original group of authors as well as a collection of technical communication faculty and student assistants at Kennesaw State University. Open Technical Communication is the 2022 winner of the OE Global Award for Excellence in the Open Reuse/Remix/Adaptation category. Check out the award page!

Oral/Interpersonal Communication by Darrel Farmer, edited by Bridget Bell and Darrel Farmer (CC-BY) .

Build effective communication skills for public speaking, teamwork, and professional interactions. [Published in 2025 by WisTech Open.]

Organizational Communication by Julie Zink, Ph.D and Zink, Julie (CC BY-SA).

This textbooks helps students demonstrate an understanding of key topics and concepts, including communication networks, media management, organizational culture and climate, intercultural communication, meetings management, ethical communication, assessing communication quality, and crisis communication – and the impact of social technologies.

Psychology of Fake News edited by Rainer Greifeneder, Mariela E. Jaffe, Eryn J. Newman, and Norbert Schwarz (CC BY-NC-ND).

This volume examines the phenomenon of fake news by bringing together leading experts from different fields within psychology and related areas, and explores what has become a prominent feature of public discourse since the first Brexit referendum and the 2016 US election campaign.

 Voices of Kakehashi in Multicultural Canada: Transcultural and Intercultural Experiences (edited by by Hiroko Noro & Tad Suzuki (CC BY-NC)

This book serves to develop a strong internal narrative that connects the diverse dimensions of intercultural experiences, ranging from scholarly work on Japanese immigration history, language pedagogy on intercultural competences, to personal accounts by the people from diverse cultural and linguistic background. In other words, it offers those who are keenly aware of the importance of the development of a global mindset with a platform or common ground to share their endeavours formerly pigeonholed and isolated, by fostering interest in community engagement and partnership building. Published by University of Victoria in 2016.

Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers by Michael A. Caulfield (CC BY).

This is an unabashedly practical guide for the student fact-checker. It supplements generic information literacy with the specific web-based techniques that can get you closer to the truth on the web more quickly.This guide will show you how to use date filters to find the source of viral content, how to assess the reputation of a scientific journal in less than five seconds, and how to see if a tweet is really from the famous person you think it is or from an impostor. It’ll show you how to find pages that have been deleted, figure out who paid for the website you’re looking at, and whether the weather portrayed in that viral video actual matches the weather in that location on that day. It’ll show you how to check a Wikipedia page for recent vandalism and how to search the text of almost any printed book to verify a quote. It’ll teach you to parse URLs and scan search result blurbs so that you are more likely to get to the right result on the first click. And it’ll show you how to avoid baking confirmation bias into your search terms.

Write Like a PR Pro by Mary Sterenberg (CC BY-NC).

Print and electronic communication, social media and even visual messaging all require a core skill: writing. This book is a practical guide to planning and writing strategically, concisely and effectively for many of the communication channels used in the current public relations environment. It connects students to professionals with expertise in different aspects of message creation and highlights the types of writing and other skills needed to be competitive in the current communication job market. Write Like a PR Pro covers how to write and develop messages in different formats from professionals with expertise in different areas of communication. It was written by an instructor who teaches at The Ohio State University.

Media Attributions

• BC Map by Adamwashere (CC BY-NC-SA).
• Canada Map Icon by Icons8 (CC BY-ND).
• Sask map from  Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).