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Open Educational Resources: Business

This site is designed to introduce OER initiatives, explain creative commons licensing and OER, and to help you get started searching for Open Educational Resources for teaching and learning.

Business

On this page you will find several open Business textbooks along with supplemental material and a few lecture videos.  

The purpose of these discipline specific pages is to showcase content that might be of interest to faculty who are considering adopting open educational resources for use in their classes. This list of content is by no means exhaustive.  The nature of open educational resources is very collaborative and it is in that spirit that we encourage any comments about the content featured on this page or recommendations of content that are not already listed here. 

For more information about Creative Commons and quick reference to license definitions see the OU Creative Commons LibGuide.

Textbooks

Business Plan Development Guide - Lee Swanson

This textbook and its accompanying spreadsheet templates were designed with and for students wanting a practical and easy-to-follow guide for developing a business plan. It follows a unique format that both explains what to do and demonstrates how to do it. 

Author:

Lee Swanson, University of Saskatchewan

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License

Textbook cover art

 

 

eMarketing: The Essential Guide to Marketing in a Digital World - Rob Stokes

The newly updated edition - based on Quirk's unique Think, Create, Engage, Optimise structure and processes - includes chapters on the latest marketing trends as well as updated facts and figures and all new real-world case studies showing the application of digital best practice.

Author:

Rob Stokes, Quirk eMarketing

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.

textbook cover art

 

 

Create or Perish: The Case for Inventions and Patents  -Robert H. Rines

This textbook is the primary book used in the MIT course Inventions and Patents.  It explores the history of private and public rights in scientific discoveries and applied engineering, leading to the development of worldwide patent systems. The classes of invention protectable under the patent laws of the U.S., including the procedures in protecting inventions in the Patent Office and the courts will be examined. Additionally, several case studies are outlined in the text.  -Robert H. Rines

Author:

Dr. Robert H. Rines

 Use of the MIT OpenCourseWare site and materials is subject to their Creative Commons License and other terms of use.

 

  

 

 

Industrial Organization -Nicolas Boccard

Our aim in this book is best understood by looking at the historical development of the field.  According to the standard definition, economic science studies the  allocation of scarce resources among alternative uses to achieve desired objectives; Industrial Organization, in turn, focuses on the firms that are involved in this process taking especially into account the fact that  competition is "among the few". -Nicolas Boccard

Authors:

Dr. Niccolas Boccard, Economics, University of Girona

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.

 

 

Business Law and the Legal Environment - Don Mayer, Daniel Warner & George Siedel

Our goal is to provide students withe a textbook that is up to date and comprehensive in its coverage of legal and regulatory issues -- and organized to permit instructors to tailor the materials to their particular approach. The book engages students by relating law to everyday events with which they are already familiar (or with which they are familiarizing themselves in other business courses) and by its clear, concise, and readable style. (An earlier business law text by authors Lieberman and Siedel was hailed "the best written text in a very crowded field."

Authors:

Don Mayer, University of Miama

Daniel Warner, Western Washington University

George Siedel, University of Michigan Business School

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.

textook cover art

 

 

 

Open Textbook Collections

Find more Business textbooks in these collections

 

 

Open Textbook Library

The Open Textbook Library is a collection of open textbooks that features reviews written by professors.  A project of the University of Minnesota, The Open Textbook Library provides a review rubric for faculty to use when evaluating textbooks and displays them for the benefit of potential adopters. 

College Open Textbooks

The College Open Textbooks Collaborative, a collection of twenty-nine educational non-profit and for-profit organizations, affiliated with more than 200 colleges, is focused on driving awareness and adoptions of open textbooks to more than 2000 community and other two-year colleges. This includes providing training for instructors adopting open resources, peer reviews of open textbooks, and mentoring online professional networks that support for authors opening their resources, and other services.  -College Open Textbooks

BC Campus Open Ed

The B.C. Open Textbook Project is funded by the BC Ministry of Advanced Education, and BCcampus is tasked with managing it. A goal of the Project is to provide flexible and affordable access to higher education resources in B.C. by making available 40 openly-licensed textbooks. These texts will be available for selection by B.C. faculty, and digital versions of the texts will be free of charge to students. For those who prefer a printed copy, this format will also be available on demand for a low cost. -BC Campus

MERLOT

MERLOT is a collection of online resources curated by a community of faculty, staff, and students of higher education.  This subset of the MERLOT collection features openly licensed textbooks for use by students and faculty.  MERLOT allows its users to rate materials and comment on specific resources.

Monopoly Gas Station Simulation

Image of a gas station

Image by Joey Bennett from Pixabay 

Monopoly Gas Station is a simulation activity by Mark Maier, Professor of Economics at Glendale Community College. In the simulation, "students predict the profit-maximizing price for gas at the one and only gas station in desert community. Then using data on demand and cost, they find the profit maximizing price and graph the result."