This article features 12 teaching innovations presented at the 2020 Association for Business Communication (ABC) annual international conference held online due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Readers can explore the classroom methods designed to enhance students' individual and career skills, critical thinking, teamwork, and report writing…

This article, the second of a two-part series, presents 12 assignments designed to help students increase their online communication skills, conduct professional conferences, use advanced presentation software, develop problem-solving and critical thinking, gain greater awareness of gender effects in communication, and perform community service.…

This article, the second in a two-part series, catalogs teaching innovations presented at the 2013 Association for Business Communication Annual Convention, New Orleans. They were presented during the My Favorite Assignment session. The 11 Favorite Assignments featured here offer the reader a variety of learning experiences, including…

This qualitative study explored college teaching in an "apprenticeship" setting, specifically the architectural design studio. The study examined studio teachers' efforts to design effective project assignments and to help students move successfully through those assignments. Two design teachers were interviewed and observed as their students…

Personal narrative writing can be encouraged and used effectively in classes and in in-service workshops because it is accessible, because the writers may use their own voices, because they can tell their own stories, and because it helps them to make sense of their own experiences. However strong the case made for this form, though, there are…

Building upon the conviction that student learning may be enhanced when the direct worlds of experience intersect with academics, this paper offers several assignments and exercises for the college-level business and professional-speaking course which intend to encourage this intersection. The paper serves as a resource of ideas for anyone who…

Experiential learning is, in its most simplistic form, a philosophical perspective that links the concrete with the abstract. If experiential learning utilizes the experiences of the learner, television is part of the learner's experience, and to ignore the pervasiveness of mass media in modern society is to ignore part of the lived experience of…

Twenty-two students in a business communications course engaged in a collaborative project with several Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, business enterprises. After the students had acquired introductory skills that would enable them to perform effectively, they were divided into six groups and began working with representatives from local businesses…

The use of mini-campaign projects in an introductory course in advertising can (1) provide students with actual experience in dealing with real advertising problems; (2) bring classroom lectures and laboratory assignments into a "real-world" perspective; (3) give students a broader perspective of advertising; (4) bring students into contact with…

The Seattle Art Museum's (SAM's) My Art Gallery Web site was born out of an actual experiment in the galleries of the museum itself. The project was called "Growing Up With Art" and was funded by a four-year grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts. SAM invited sixth-grade classes from local schools into the museum to curate two exhibitions…

The use of interpretive reporting techniques and programs offering real world training to writers may provide solutions to the problems encountered in writing about science for the mass media. Both science and environmental writers have suggested that the problems they face would be decreased by the use of more interpretive and investigative…

It is difficult for a student to understand small group communication and the role communication plays in making an experience a positive or negative one until he or she is actually involved in small group experience. Such goes the argument for experiential learning in the classroom. By incorporating a service-learning component into the…

Students in the beginning public relations course at Kansas State University work in small groups to make case studies of the public relations needs of organizations (usually campus groups or nonprofit community organizations) and to develop public relations plans for them. After receiving project instructions, students suggest possible clients,…

To identify specific instructional features prompting meaningful change among teacher candidates, this literature review evaluated studies that examined the influence of teacher education coursework on preservice teachers' conceptions and practices. Literature came from books and from journals published between 1992-96. The review examined whether…

This paper discusses a number of innovative techniques that were used to teach courses in Information Systems to undergraduate and graduate students. While none of these techniques is individually innovative, the combination of techniques provides a true "hands-on" environment for students; because of the way that the components of the…