Open@VT

The Open Education Initiative at Virginia Tech is pleased to announce a newly-adapted work by Dr. Laura Neser. Introduction to Earth Science is a 530+ page open textbook designed to provide a comprehensive introduction to Earth Science that can be freely accessed online, read offline, printed, or purchased as a print-on-demand book. It is intended for a typical 1000-level university introductory course in the Geosciences, although its contents could be applied to many other related courses.

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The Open Education Initiative at the University Libraries at Virginia Tech is pleased to announce Construction Contracting: Business and Legal Principles, Second Edition by Stewart H. Bartholomew as a CC BY NC-SA 4.0 open textbook. Construction Contracting is the third rights reversion project undertaken by the Open Education Initiative.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Construction Contracting: Business and Legal Principles, Second Edition by Stuart H. Bartholomew is a 400+ page university-level introduction to construction contracting as it applies to typical, every-day situations. It explains “theoretical” ideas in terms of what really happens in practice, and emphasizes the more common case law holdings and industry customs that help avoid troublesome legal issues during the completion of a project. 

The text is freely available in PDF and online in Pressbooks. Instructors reviewing or adopting this book for a course are encouraged to report their interest at: https://bit.ly/construction_contracting 

The book is released with permission of the Bartholomew Estate by the University Libraries at Virginia Tech under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 international license. Rights were reverted from the previous publisher to the estate prior to Virginia Tech’s agreement with the Estate. The book was previously published by Pearson Education, Inc. under their Prentice Hall imprint in 2002 (ISBN: 1-13-091055-4) Any derivatives of this work must comply with the requirements of the Creative Commons license and include the following statement, “This material was previously published by Pearson Education, Inc.”

The Open Education Initiative at the University Libraries at Virginia Tech is grateful to the Estate of Mr. Bartholomew for their willingness to pursue rights-reversion of the book and permission to release it under a CC BY NC-SA 4.0 license.

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Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine and Virginia Tech Publishing are pleased to announce publication of two new open textbooks by Andrew Binks, titled Pulmonary Physiology for Pre-Clinical Students and Pulmonary Pathophysiology for Pre-Clinical Students. These works are the fourth and fifth in a five-volume series of open textbooks for pre-clinical medical education by Renee LeClair and Andrew Binks.

Instructors reviewing or adopting texts are requested to register their interest at: https://bit.ly/interest-preclinical.

Pulmonary Physiology for Pre-Clinical Students (101 pages) is an undergraduate medical-level resource for foundational knowledge of pulmonary physiology. 

Pulmonary Pathophysiology for Pre-Clinical Students (82 pages) is an undergraduate medical-level resource for foundational knowledge of pulmonary pathophysiology. The text assumes that the students will have an understanding of basic pulmonary physiology that will be helpful to understand the content presented here. 

Virginia Tech’s Kevin T. Crofton Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering and Virginia Tech Publishing are pleased to announce publication of a new open textbook by Eric Raymond Johnson, Ph.D., titled, Aerospace Structures.

Aerospace Structures (https://doi.org/10.21061/AerospaceStructures) is a 600+ page text and reference book for junior, senior, and graduate-level aerospace engineering students.

The text begins with a discussion of the aerodynamic and inertia loads acting on aircraft in symmetric flight and presents a linear theory for the statics and dynamic response of thin-walled straight bars with closed and open cross-sections. Isotropic and fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) composite materials including temperature effects are modeled with Hooke’s law. Methods of analyses are by differential equations, Castigliano’s theorems, the direct stiffness method, the finite element method, and Lagrange’s equations. There are numerous examples for the response of axial bars, beams, coplanar trusses, coplanar frames, and coplanar curved bars. Failure initiation by the von Mises yield criterion, buckling, wing divergence, fracture, and by Puck’s criterion for FRP composites are presented in the examples.

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by Max Esterhuizen with Anita Walz and Donna Westfall-Rudd

New book helps instructors increase the effectiveness of teaching diverse groups of students.

The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Virginia Tech Publishing have released a new open textbook titled Teaching in the University: Learning from Graduate Students and Early Career Faculty.

The book is written by 20 current and former students in the Graduate Teaching Scholars Program and is edited by Donna Westfall-Rudd, the director of the program and associate professor in the Department of Agricultural Leadership and Community Education, and recent Ph.D. recipients and program teaching assistants Courtney Vengrin ‘15 and Jeremy Elliot-Engel ‘18. Leah Hamilton, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Food Science and Technology, peer-reviewed the book.

As an Open Educational Resource, this textbook provides free access to peer-reviewed guidance and reflection on becoming an instructor based on the experiences of fellow new instructors.

The edited collection provides insight and strategies for successful teaching, advising, and mentoring of graduate students. The authors offer support and encouragement for the implementation of student-centered teaching practices relevant to college classrooms. They offer this resource for fellow faculty and graduate students to improve instruction and engagement.