Social media offers an exciting new area for our discipline to produce research and pedagogy that is in high demand by students, industry constituents, and other disciplines. This article discusses why business communication scholars should focus on social media as an important stream of study and outlines an MBA course in social media strategy…

The 12 Favorite Assignments featured in this article were presented at the 2011 Annual Convention of the Association for Business Communication (ABC), Montreal, Canada. A variety of learning objectives are featured: delivering bad news, handling difficult people, persuasion, reporting financial analysis, electronic media, face-to-face…

Plagiarism can be "plaguing" if it is not discussed, understood, and enforced by the professor right at the beginning of the course and throughout the semester. Students usually don't "have" to cheat or plagiarize; they do so mainly because "they can." Professors who turn a deaf ear or a blind eye to students who plagiarize create deleterious…

Plagiarism does exist at universities today. In some cases, students are naive with respect to understanding what plagiarism is and how to avoid it. In other cases, students blatantly disregard and disrespect the written work of others, claiming it as their own. Regardless, educators must be vigilant in their efforts to discourage and prevent…

Plagiarism can be controlled, not stopped. The more appropriate question to ask is: What can be done to encourage students to "cheat" correctly by doing the assignment the way it was intended? Cheating by college students continues to reach epidemic proportions on selected campuses, as witnessed by the recent episode at Central Florida University,…

Students write papers in many of their courses to improve their writing skills and to foster an active attitude toward learning. Every year, they hand in hundreds of papers for teachers to assess. This stream may get polluted in two ways: by simple copying from Internet sources and by the exchange of text fragments between students. These…

In this paper, the authors provide a brief description of written (letter) assignments that use student pairs in a virtual Blackboard-based discussion board. The authors begin their discourse with the purposes for employing this teaching and learning method: (1) To allow students to function in a team structure; (2) To provide written knowledge…

Business professionals often use standard templates when composing documents, and teachers of business writing direct students to textbook examples to use as sample formats. Good instructors do want to provide their students with informative examples of what is expected, especially in an online course environment where students cannot raise their…

Managing student plagiarism can cause instructors to feel as if they are serving educational institutions in the role of investigator rather than educator. Since many educators continue to struggle with the issue of student plagiarism, the author interviewed some of her colleagues. In this article, she shares her and her colleagues' antiplagiarism…

Describes one teacher's three-step process for teaching introductory-level business writing students how to tap the Internet's job search resources. (SR)

Describes a number of Internet-based assignments incorporated into a written business communications course, including e-mail, home pages, hypertext documents, an Internet-based unit, an electronic job hunting unit, and "PowerPoint" slides. (SR)

The purpose of this longitudinal study was to identify the short- and long-term impact of business communication education on students' skill developments and performance outcomes. Nearly 400 students at an AACSC International-accredited business college participated in the study during their sophomore and senior years. The findings indicate that…

As advances in information communication technology have continued to affect business communication, the challenge for teachers over the past decade has been to stay abreast of new developments by integrating into the curriculum current theoretical and practice-based perspectives that can inform their students how to effectively create, manage,…