Virginia Tech Libraries and the Pamplin College of Business are pleased to announce the publication of Fundamentals of Business, a full color, 440+ page free online textbook for Virginia Tech’s Foundations of Business course. This Virginia Tech course averages 14 sections with over 700 students in Fall semesters.
The textbook is an open educational resource and may be customized and redistributed non-commercially with attribution (CC BY NC SA 3.0) TABLE OF CONTENTS includes Teamwork in Business, Chapter 1: The Foundations of Business, Chapter 2: Economics and Business, Chapter 3: Ethics and Social Responsibility, Chapter 4: Business in a Global Environment, Chapter 5: Forms of Business Ownership, Chapter 6: Entrepreneurship: Starting a Business, Chapter 7: Management and Leadership, Chapter 8: Structuring Organizations, Chapter 9: Operations Management, Chapter 10: Motivating Employees, Chapter 11: Managing Human Resources, Chapter 12: Union/Management Issues, Chapter 13: Marketing: Providing Value to Customers, Chapter 14: Pricing Strategy, Chapter 15: Hospitality and Tourism, Chapter 16: Accounting and Financial Information, Chapter 17: Personal Finances
Selected graphics produced by Brian Craig are available CC BY 4.0 via WikimediaCommons. The first openly licensed book of its kind created at Virginia Tech, the book is in direct response to two problems faced by Pamplin’s team of professors: a used edition of the previous textbook was priced as high as $215, and students were not engaged by the previous text. The CC license legally allows modification and non-commercial redistribution with attribution.
In August 2018, the team significantly updated, redesigned, and contributed new content to create a learning resource that fits course learning objectives and reduces student textbook costs for this course to zero. Through a grant from the University Libraries, three students were hired to peer review drafts of the text. The team worked together through details of updating data, designing new figures, and ensuring web and print-on-demand ready layout. The resulting work, Fundamentals of Business, is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. In addition to faculty members’ ability to customize content and resolution of student affordability issues, the availability of an openly licensed text in common, editable file format bodes well for faculty at other institutions seeking to leverage academic freedom in support of student learning and affordability. The book is representative of a larger movement to empower faculty to freely adopt, adapt and author a myriad of course types. We hope that many other institutions will take advantage of the opportunity to adopt, adapt or remix the book to fit their needs. The book is the work of Prof. Stephen Skripak and his team of faculty colleagues from the Pamplin College of Business, Anastasia Cortes and Richard Parsons, open education librarian Anita Walz, graphic designers Brian Craig and Trevor Finney, and student peer reviewers Jonathan De Pena, Nina Lindsay, and Sachi Soni. Assistive Technologies consulted on the accessibility of the textbook.
Editable files are available in MSWord in a .zip folder. Please view the README.txt file within this zipped collection.
Dr. L Blue (Faculty)