Audience and Purpose

This eTextbook is geared toward college students taking their first business course. It is not intended to replicate a traditional textbook or to provide a comprehensive treatment of the included topics; instead, the aim is to provide a streamlined, engaging, and interactive introduction to topics students will explore more deeply in future coursework, with the goal of introducing them to foundational concepts in business and helping them understand the “bigger picture” of the business world. 

Open Education Resource

This eTextbook is an open education resource (OER) that substantially integrates, remixes, updates, and builds on a number of existing open-access textbooks and materials, which are attributed at the end of each chapter. I created many of the figures and H5P interactive components included in this eTextbook, selected high-quality videos to incorporate into most chapters, and chose many of the images used throughout the eTextbook. I also curated a collection of supplemental resources for students to learn more, included at the end of each chapter.

Third-party, copyrighted materials such as videos are incorporated into this eTextbook using the embed functionality offered by the respective hosting platforms (YouTube, in most cases) and are not encompassed by the creative commons licenses applied to other components of this OER.

Creative common licenses vary throughout the text. Chapter-level licenses are noted at the end of each chapter and licenses for H5P components and figures are noted individually.

Format

Because this eTextbook incorporates a number of interactive components, it is intended to be used online rather than in PDF or hardcopy format. I recommend using a laptop computer, desktop computer, or tablet to access this eTextbook, rather than a smaller device such as a mobile phone.

Acknowledgements

I received a UVA Library Affordability and Equity “Create” Grant, funded by The Jefferson Trust, in May 2023 to support the development of this eTextbook. I received assistance from The Captioning Project at UVA in creating many of the transcripts for the included videos. Nicolas Newcomb, a UVA student, assisted with the creation of many of the end-of-chapter flashcards and some other H5P interactive components, and also drafted the text for some of the examples used in the text (Examples 3.1 and 3.2). Nicolas’s work on this project was supported by the UVA Library Affordability and Equity “Create” Grant.