This month’s blog post was contributed by Abbey Elder, Open Access & Scholarly Communication Librarian at Iowa State University.
Over the past decade, more and more instructors have begun adopting open textbooks in their courses as they become aware of these resources. However, awareness of ancillary OER and open courseware has not seen the same uptake, in part due to the lack of a centralized repository for these materials. While some might be aware of MIT OpenCourseWare or OER Commons, effectively browsing these collections is not easy for new users.
So, for this month’s resource highlight, we wanted to showcase “Introduction to Management,” a course pack for general business and management courses from the B.C. Open Collection (funded by British Columbia and supported by BCcampus).
This Introduction to Management course pack was developed by Scott van Dyk, an instructor at Coast Mountain College in Terrace in British Columbia. It includes lesson plans, instructor guides, readings, case studies, and exams for Business courses. I was particularly excited to see the case studies provided within the pack, since these types of exercises are often as difficult to locate as they are useful for learning.
Learning Objectives
The following Learning Outcomes are aligned to the course pack:
- Explain what management is, including the types of work and the activities of management
- Distinguish what makes a company socially-responsible
- Evaluate strategic alternatives for a business and make a business decision with a decision matrix
- Construct and compare organizational designs
- Contribute to effective group work using management best-practices
- Interpret what motivates people and examine how leaders can influence that motivation
- Adopt appropriate conflict resolution techniques used in Human Resources Management
- Propose business solutions to real-world problems
If you know a Management instructor looking for OER that provide a more all-inclusive course experience, consider sending this option their way!
About the BC Open Collection
A quick note, for those of you interested: the BC Open Collection is not a comprehensive database of OER, but it does have a selection of highly curated materials appropriate for a variety of disciplines.
If you’re looking for a place to start with OER or if you want to provide a user-friendly experience for faculty new to these materials, I highly recommend checking out what the BC Open Collection has to offer!