Open Pedagogy Assignments are assignments in which students use their agency and creativity to create knowledge artifacts that can support their own learning, their classmates’ learning, and the learning of students around the world. (See this peer-reviewed article for more details.) The assignment on this page is aligned to the learning outcomes of Business Communication for Managers and we’ve identified the module where the reading appears. All of the assignments can be created with a cell phone camera or any video recording device, Google or Word documents, and your learning management system. 

In the first module of the course, we introduce effective communication in a business setting. For this assignment, you are going to create a short video of less than two minutes about your experience with a business either as an employee or as a customer. Think about a time when you had a positive experience with communicating your perspective in a business setting.

It’s one thing to read about the experiences of other people and it’s quite another experience to see and listen to people’s stories. For this assignment, let’s use informal stories about your positive experiences to share what works for managers.

Using your cell phone or any other recording device, create a short video for this assignment. You don’t have to edit or create a professional-grade film. You’ve most likely have done this type of recording already on social media, so feel free to use the same informal conversational tone.

Think of your audience as other students who are eager to improve their communication skills in a business setting. In your video, you’ll want to practice using the concepts (in bold listed below) of the seven pillars of business communication.

If you need some questions to guide your response, here is a short list.

The seven pillars of communication have the following elements:

1. What objective details can you give your audience about the event?
2. How did the company demonstrate an understanding of audience knowledge?
3. What were the relevant details?
4. What was clear about the communication in your experience?
5. What were the concise details of the exchange?
6. What objective details can you give your audience about the event?
7. How were the speakers consistent in their messaging?
8. What left you feeling complete about the exchange?

A Note To Teachers: Your students in the first term will create videos, and with their permission you can upload them into your course in order to show examples for the next term. The idea will be to have students generate content that other students can listen to and learn from with this assignment. Encourage them to use positive and negative examples from their work experience or from their experience as customers.