My colleagues at Kwantlen Polytechnic University have been really rising to the occasion during the pandemic, in all ways. I’m especially impressed, as an editor, by how prolific and intelligent their publishing ventures have been. Here’s another super-helpful one.
My Kwantlen colleague Arley Cruthers writes:
For those of you who teach business communications, my colleagues Melissa Ashman, John Grant, Petti Fong, Dr. Seanna Takacs and I collaborated to make an OOC (Open Online Course). Basically, it’s a ‘course in a box’ built using OER [Open Educational Resources] resources with a CC-BY license, so anyone can either use the whole thing (assignments, activities, mini-lectures, readings etc) or use/adapt/remix bits and pieces. We got a grant from BCCampus to do it, so we were able to do things like have a focus group with students and compensate them for their feedback.
From the book’s intro:
This course is designed for instructors who have the option of delivering the content either synchronously or asynchronously. … Students will explore and practice concepts such as their own writing beliefs, genres, audience analysis, storytelling, forming arguments, evaluating sources, persuasion, and verbal and written presentation skills. Learning and applying those skills are needed … in a world where new forms of engagement, relationship-building, critical thinking, internationalization, decolonization, anti-racism, and Indigenization form the foundation of today’s workplace.
I used Arley’s recently published Business Writing for Everyone in two first-year classes this summer. I hadn’t taught these classes in a few years. Her book made life a lot easier for me, and my students enjoyed reading it.
Here’s more on my university’s Open Learning initiatives.
