About This Course Pack
This is a first-year business communications course composed of 13 weeks of coursework. This course explores the many strategies and methods one might employ to ensure important messages are communicated in a professional manner. This course establishes business communication fundamentals such as delivering bad news, writing informational reports, creating persuasive messages, designing and delivering professional presentations, and preparing for employment searches.
While this course has been designed as a distributed learning course, 6 mandatory synchronous sessions have been built in. Students will need between 7 and 10 hours per week to complete activities and assignments. This course uses open educational resources (OER) that are available for free and may be adapted and distributed.
Included in this course package is a course map, which lays out the course week by week and describes each week’s learning outcomes, readings, synchronous session requirements, activities, and assessments.
Other features of this course include a sample course syllabus, which contains a workload breakdown, required materials and technologies, assignment descriptions, suggested assignment weighting, discussion forum prompts, and a marking rubric; suggestions for a final exam; weekly student guides with activity checklists and learning outcomes; detailed synchronous session lesson plans; PowerPoint slides for synchronous lectures; and Word documents and PowerPoint slides with assignment instructions and examples.