This blog post was written by Steve Stapleton, University of Nottingham.
This is an introductory blog post that will be discussed in detail in another blog post in May 2018.
One of the last things that we need to do as part of the project at Nottingham is to investigate the potential for our two e-textbooks to be used by other HE and FE institutions. The basic premise being that if they are useful for our own students, which are survey results seems to suggest they are. Then could they also be useful for students at other institutions.
Our Applied Ethics e-textbook is available in its entity for free under a Creative Commons Licence. And most of our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) e-textbook is also available for free, with the later chapters available at low cost for any student that wished to access it. The free or low cost entry points for students means that the books could be incorporated into other institutions. However, in reality there are likely to be barriers that need to be overcome for this to happen. And other institutions would of course need to see value in adopting them.
Work will start soon on looking at this in detail. The initial plan for this is to work closely with the lead authors and faculty teams that produced the books as the most likely route into other institutions is through their contacts. There will be a further blog post in May 2018 that will talk through the detail of what we did and what the results of the work has been.