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 a 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. 

Learning Outcome 4.1.5: Explain secondary research and how it is used to provide support to the report

In the module on Research, we provide a general overview about the role of primary and secondary research in writing business reports. For this assignment, you are going to work with a small group to hunt down useful links and resources for your fellow students about local businesses. This work will become a living document that future students will use.

Think of your audience as friends who just got a job with a local business. You want to help them understand their new employer with the best information you can find.

Choose one of the bullets in the Primary Research heading as your topic: Interviews, Surveys, Observations, or Analysis.

• In your own words, summarize on a Google Doc, or a similar online tool, why your topic is important to a researcher in business communication.
• Find an example of your topic from a business website. Provide the link.
• Why is your topic useful as secondary research with report writing? In other words, when would you use your topic in a report and why?

A Note To Teachers: You may want to break your students into groups and let them work on their own document that you will eventually create into one document. You may also want to point them to local businesses or industries that you focus on in your course such as retail or hospitality. If your first term’s assignment is to create the document, think of the next term’s assignment as checking that all of the links are correct and adding advice.