Business Communications

This is a first-year business communications course. The designers of this course have taken a process-oriented approach that focuses less on genre and more on the decisions that business communicators make. Students will be encouraged to reflect on their own writing beliefs, values, and experiences, then apply these learnings to a business communication context. This course intentionally avoids relying heavily on video content, since many students do not have stable internet access.

Students who take this course will learn how to analyze context and audience, determine purpose, message content, visual design, and media in order to write workplace messages that can be received, understood, used, and retrieved with speed and accuracy. As is, the course is centred around a blogging assignment, but you can adapt the materials, if you wish.

This course can be used as a “course in a box” that you can plug into your learning management system and use. Flexibility has been built in so that you can take bits and pieces of the course’s six modules that work for you and remix them, since everything in this course package has a Creative Commons licence.

Included in this course package is a course plan for instructors, which matches learning outcomes to assignments, provides sample assignments and weighting, and breaks down the course structure week by week with associated learning outcomes, learning skills, resources, learning activities, suggestions for showing care and building community, and assignments.

Other features of this course include an instructor guide that details all the components of the course and explains how to use them; a sample course syllabus; weekly lesson plans for students with notes for instructors; a suggested assignment package; weekly readings from an open textbook; interactive asynchronous lectures, provided in H5P, PowerPoint, and audio file formats; and participation activities, along with supplementary resources.