By Vallerie Mott, Course Product Manager
We’re excited to announce the release of a new version of Introduction to Business, one of Lumen’s most popular OER courses. A huge benefit of using OER is our ability to make rapid, timely updates focused on improving student learning.
This blog post outlines the improvements we made to this latest version of the course, as well as additional updates planned for 2019.
Recent Updates
The latest Introduction to Business updates incorporate faculty feedback about where to adjust OER content to improve coverage, better support student learning, and strengthen alignment with course outcomes. Here’s a rundown of what’s improved.
- Revised “Entrepreneurship” Module: Stronger content and embedded practice questions added.
- New “Using Technology to Manage Business Information” Module: New OER content with embedded practice questions included
- Revised “Marketing Mix” Module: Scope adjusted to better fit a survey course
- Updated PowerPoints: Improved look-and-feel with updated theme
- Updates to “Economic Environment” Module: Added embedded practice opportunities
- Updates to “Globalization” Module: New interactive material to teach absolute and comparative advantage (and replace a broken game link)
The updated course is available in both Waymaker and Candela formats. If you’re not using Waymaker yet, this could be a good time to consider making the switch. Waymaker courseware demonstrates a lot of promise for lowering drop rates and closing the performance gap between Pell-eligible students and their non-Pell-eligible peers.
More Improvements Ahead
As part of the continuous improvement process for this course, we’re using the RISE Framework to analyze which learning outcomes are most in need of attention in order to strengthen learning. Then we’ll focus on improving those areas. We’re already planning the following updates:
- Embedded practice questions added throughout course
- Updates to ensure content remains current
- Development of 2+ new interactives targeting areas students struggle, and where content must improve in order to better support student learning
- General review and improvements to formative and summative assessment questions across the full course
These updates will automatically appear in this new version of the course when they’re completed (expected delivery in mid-late April 2019).
Do you have ideas or feedback you’d like to share?
If you’ve been teaching or evaluating Lumen’s Introduction to Business course and you have feedback to share, we’d love to hear from you: send a message to support@lumenlearning.com. If you have recommended OER resources you’d like to share, please tell us about them using this form.
Interested in other OER courses for Business?
Recently we added three new OER courses for business: 1) Business Communication, 2) Accounting for Managers, and 3) Retail Management. Visit our public catalog to take a look.
Request Any Lumen Course!
To review and adopt the new Introduction to Business or any other Lumen course, take these steps:
- Check out the course materials in our public catalog
- Use the “Try This Course” button on any course detail page to tell us which course(s) you’re interested in … OR send a note to support@lumenlearning.com to request a Lumen course.
To start teaching with Lumen course materials, you’ll need to take the easy step of importing a new cartridge into your LMS. After that, you can go through your regular course setup steps to customize the materials to fit your syllabus and how you teach your course.