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.) Each of these assignments is aligned to the learning outcomes of Principles of Retail Management  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 module on Strategic Retail Planning and Management, we provide a general overview about vision and mission statements.

For this assignment, you are going to work with a small group to research useful links and resources for your fellow students about local and regional businesses. This work will become a living document that future students will use. Find a business in your local or regional area and do a little research on their mission and vision statements.

1. In your own words, summarize on a Google Doc, or a similar online tool, document the name of the business and provide a link to their mission and vision statement.
2. Summarize the vision and mission statement in your own words.
3. What are the similarities and the differences between the vision and the mission statements for the business you selected?

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 curate into one document that you can use for future courses. You may also want to point them to local businesses or industries that you focus on in your course such as retail or hospitality. We’ve included local and regional businesses, but you could change this assignment to focus on national or global corporations. 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 more examples for students to read and discuss. This assignment is an excellent discussion board conversation where students can compare and contrast statements.