Open@VT

The Open Education Initiative and Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech are pleased to announce the release of a 4th edition of Fundamentals of Business  and selected new slide decks to accompany chapters.

Fundamentals of Business  https://doi.org/10.21061/fundamentalsofbusiness4e , fourth edition (2023) is an 434-page open education resource intended to serve as a no-cost, faculty-customizable primary text for one-semester undergraduate introductory business courses. It covers the following topics in business: Teamwork; economics; ethics; entrepreneurship; business ownership, management, and leadership; organizational structures and operations management; human resources and motivating employees; managing in labor union contexts; marketing and pricing strategy; hospitality and tourism, accounting and finance, personal finances, and technology in business. The textbook was designed for use in Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business introductory level business course, MGT1104 Foundations of Business and is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 4.0 license (CC BY NC-SA 4.0).

Instructors reviewing, adopting, or adapting this textbook are asked to please help us understand your use of the material by filling out this form http://bit.ly/business-interest.

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The Open Education Initiative at Virginia Tech is pleased to announce a new peer-reviewed open textbook, Fish, Fishing and Conservation (2023) by Donald J. Orth, Ph.D. of Virginia Tech https://doi.org/10.21061/fishandconservation

Are you an instructor reviewing or adopting this book for an instructional purpose? Instructors adopting or reviewing this text are encouraged to record their use at https://bit.ly/fishandconservation_interest. This helps the book’s sponsors to understand this open textbook’s impact.

Fish, Fishing, and Conservation is a 389-page, peer-reviewed open textbook intended for undergraduate students who are exploring majors in Fish & Wildlife. It is also relevant to a general audience or for use in courses which explore social and ethical aspects of fish, fishing and conservation. Read a review of this book.

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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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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.