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Introduction to Philosophy: Ethics: What is an Open Textbook?

Introduction to Philosophy: Ethics
What is an Open Textbook?
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table of contents
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Table Of Contents
  5. What is an Open Textbook?
  6. How to Access and Use the Books
  7. Introduction to the Series
  8. Praise for the Book
  9. Acknowledgements
  10. Introduction to the Book
  11. Aren’t Right and Wrong Just Matters of Opinion? On Moral Relativism and Subjectivism
  12. Can We Have Ethics without Religion? On Divine Command Theory and Natural Law Theory
  13. How Can I Be a Better Person? On Virtue Ethics
  14. What’s in it for Me? On Egoism and Social Contract Theory
  15. Utilitarianism
  16. Kantian Deontology
  17. Feminism and Feminist Ethics
  18. Evolutionary Ethics
  19. About the Contributors
  20. Feedback and Suggestions
  21. Adoption Form
  22. Licensing and Attribution Information
  23. Review Statement
  24. Accessibility Assessment
  25. Version History

1

What is an Open Textbook?

What is an open textbook

Christina Hendricks

An open textbook is like a commercial textbook, except: (1) it is publicly available online free of charge (and at low-cost in print), and (2) it has an open license that allows others to reuse it, download and revise it, and redistribute it. This book has a Creative Commons Attribution license, which allows reuse, revision, and redistribution so long as the original creator is attributed (please see the licensing information for this book for more information).

In addition to saving students money, an open textbook can be revised to be better contextualized to one’s own teaching. In a recent study of undergraduate students in an introductory level physics course, students reported that the thing they most appreciated about the open textbook used in that course was that it was customized to fit the course, followed very closely by the fact that it was free of cost (Hendricks, Reinsberg, and Rieger 2017). For example, in an open textbook one may add in examples more relevant to one’s own context or the topic of a course, or embedded slides, videos, or other resources. Note from the licensing information for this book that one must clarify in such cases that the book is an adaptation.

A number of commercial publishers offer relatively inexpensive digital textbooks (whether on their own or available through an access code that students must pay to purchase), but these may have certain limitations and other issues:

  • Access for students is often limited to a short period of time;
  • Students cannot buy used copies from others, nor sell their own copies to others, to save money;
  • Depending on the platform, there may be limits to how students can interact with and take notes on the books (and they may not be able to export their notes outside the book, so lose access to those as well when they lose access to the book).

None of these is the case with open textbooks like the Introduction to Philosophy series. Students can download any book in this series and keep it for as long as they wish. They can interact with it in multiple formats: on the web; as editable word processing formats; offline as PDF, EPUB; as a physical print book, and more.

See the next section, “How to Access and Use the Books,” for more information on what the open license on this book allows, and how to properly attribute the work when reusing, redistributing, or adapting.

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Copyright © 2019. Introduction to Philosophy: Ethics by Frank Aragbonfoh Abumere, Douglas Giles, Ya-Yun (Sherry) Kao, Michael Klenk, Joseph Kranak, Kathryn MacKay, Jeffrey Morgan, Paul Rezkalla, George Matthews (Book Editor), and Christina Hendricks (Series Editor) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
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