ENG 272w Business Communication

What to Expect in ENG 272w

ENG 272w Business Communication is a writing-intensive general education course at Minnesota State University, Mankato. "Writing intensive" means that you will be required to complete a minimum of 20 pages of writing, and 10 pages of that work must be revised and resubmitted for evaluation.

In the Spring 2012 semester, I am experimenting with an educational simulation that uses student driven learning techniques. In this simulation, you will assume the role of a business communication intern at m-Provise Corporation. You will be assigned a variety of tasks of increasing complexity and responsibility. These tasks are designed to help you develop competence in business communication tasks that are often encountered by college interns and new college graduates. Rather than explicitly directing your efforts, the assignments will present a scenario that requires you to perform a business communication task. Together we will analyze the situation to help you prepare for the project, such as recognizing the audience(s) and purpose, identifying primary and secondary research that may need to be completed, and developing questions that you should ask your supervisor to ensure that you understand the work expected of you.

The course also uses a grading contract, which means that you may choose the quantity and complexity of work that you wish to complete. Our focus will be on the quality of the document and its readiness to be distributed to its audience(s) rather than on points or letter grades for each project.

Format & Time Commitment

Students often expect an online class to require less time than an on-campus class. Unfortunately, that's not true in this case.

In an ordinary four-credit course that meets on campus, you should expect to spend up to four hours each week in the classroom for lecture, discussion, activities, and workshops, plus an additional eight hours outside of class reading and working on assignments. In my online courses, you should expect to spend an equivalent amount of time on the course, but organized in different ways:

• Weekly class chats using Adobe Connect. During the chat, expect to participate in large and small group discussion as well as analysis and planning activities to help you complete the assignments. You do not need to purchase software nor do you need to create an account to join the chats. (90 minutes per week)
• Weekly bulletin-board discussions using D2L. (60-90 minutes per week)
• Podcast lectures and demonstrations (30-60 minutes per week)
• Reading textbooks.
• Completing assignments, quizzes, surveys, etc.

Learning Objectives

Students completing the course with a satisfactory grade should be able to demonstrate their ability to

• Analyze the contexts in which they communicate (the entire rhetorical situation as determined by audience, occasion, and intention) and to tailor the style and the structures of their documents to suit their occasions, audiences, and purposes to discover, efficiently generate, and effectively organize information through use of the typical genres of business documents
• Research and document information as appropriate to their profession and to their communication tasks
• Understand the generic requirements of selected workplace documents.
• Use appropriate hardware and software to produce materials in print or electronic form. This means mastering basic techniques in working with operating systems, word-processing programs, paint or drawing programs, spreadsheets, and presentation software in order to solve business communication tasks
• Understand and implement principles of effective document design in preparing business documents.
• Critique and edit their own and their classmates' documents
• Usability test (print or electronic) documents
• Participate in the collaborative planning and execution of a project.
• Understand the ways in which ethical issues influence professional communication in your academic and professional disciplines.