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Introduction to Business

Course Description

This course introduces students to the world of business. Students will develop an understanding of the functions of business, including accounting, marketing, information and communication technology, human resources, and production, and of the importance of ethics and social responsibility. This course builds a foundation for further studies in business and helps students develop the business knowledge and skills they will need in their everyday lives.

Teaching / Learning Strategies

As in a conventional classroom, instructors employ a range of strategies for teaching a course:

  • Clear writing that connects business studies to relevant situational problems

  • Examples of full solutions in various contexts and opportunities to practice

  • Direct instruction and coaching on student work by the teacher

In addition, teachers and students have at their disposal a number of tools that are unique to electronic learning environments:

  • Electronic simulation activities

  • Video presentations

  • Discussion boards and email

  • Assessments

  • Interactive activities that engage both the student and teacher in the subject

  • Peer review and assessment

Assignments will be submitted. Tests will run at a time convenient for the student, and the course ends in a final exam which the student writes under the supervision of a proctor. The final mark and report card are then forwarded to the student's home school.

Students must achieve the Ministry of Education learning expectations of a course and complete 110 hours of planned learning activities in order to earn a course credit. Students must keep a learning log throughout their course which outlines the activities they have completed and their total learning hours.

Students are expected to access and participate actively in course work and course forums on a regular and frequent basis. This interaction with other students is a major component of this course and there are minimum requirements for student communication and contribution.

Seven business processes will form the heart of the teaching and learning strategies used

  • Communicating: To improve student success there will be several opportunities for students to share their understanding both in oral as well as written form.

  • Problem solving: Scaffolding of knowledge, detecting patterns, making and justifying conjectures, guiding students as they apply their chosen strategy, directing students to use multiple strategies to solve the same problem, when appropriate, recognizing, encouraging, and applauding perseverance, discussing the relative merits of different strategies for specific types of problems.

  • Reasoning and proving: Asking questions that get students to hypothesize, providing students with one or more numerical examples that parallel these with the generalization and describing their thinking in more detail.

  • Reflecting: Modeling the reflective process, asking students how they know.

  • Selecting Tools and Computational Strategies: Modeling the use of tools and having students use technology to help solve problems.

  • Connecting: Activating prior knowledge when introducing a new concept in order to make a smooth connection between previous learning and new concepts, and introducing skills in context to make connections between particular manipulations and problems that require them.

  • Representing: Modeling various ways to demonstrate understanding, posing questions that require students to use different representations as they are working at each level of conceptual development - concrete, visual or symbolic, allowing individual students the time they need to solidify their understanding at each conceptual stage.

Assessment and Evaluation

Daryk's approach to assessment and evaluation is based on the Ontario Ministry of Education's Growing Success 2010 document. Assessment is the process of gathering information that accurately reflects how well a student is achieving the curriculum expectations in a subject or course.

The primary purpose of assessment is to improve student learning. Assessment for this purpose is seen as both "assessment for learning" and "assessment as learning". As part of assessment for learning, teachers provide students with descriptive feedback and coaching for improvement. Teachers engage in assessment as learning by helping all students develop their capacity to be independent, autonomous learners who are able to set individual goals, monitor their own progress, determine next steps, and reflect on their thinking and learning. Daryk teachers use evidence from a variety of sources in their assessment. These include formal and informal observations, discussions, conversations, questioning, assignments, projects, portfolios, self-assessments, self-reflections, essays, and tests.

Assessment occurs concurrently and seamlessly with instruction. Our courses contain multiple opportunities for students to obtain information about their progress and achievement, and to receive feedback that will help them improve their learning. Students can monitor their own success through the tracking of learning goals and success criteria throughout all courses.

Summative "assessment of learning" activities occur at or near the end of periods of learning. Evidence of student achievement for evaluation is also collected over time from different sources, such as discussions, conversations and observation of the development of the student's learning. Using multiple sources of evidence increases the reliability and validity of this evaluation. The evaluations are expressed as a percentage based upon the levels of achievement.

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