Business and Society (BUS 3306) at UoPeople

Business and Society (BUS 3306) is another course I took last term at the UoPeople. It was the first time I took 3 courses at the UoPeople. I will share the experience of taking three courses and working full time in another blog. I’ll try to keep these entries short as I’m traveling at the moment for work. If I were to sum up, Business and Society, I would say that it felt like Ethics and Social Responsibility (PHIL 1404) with some added terms and concepts. Basically, you learn about how business and society are interconnected from the perspective of ethics, sustainability, corporate social responsibility, diversity, and Green initiatives.

My class had about 30 students but not many dropped out. The class was quite civil with students mostly at the end of their degree at the UoPeople. My instructor had a PH.D. in the relevant field and had been teaching at the UoPeople for a couple of years. She was probably one of the only instructors that admitted that students are responsible for their own learning and that she was simply there to guide them and support that learning. She was absent most of the time during the course and only graded the Learning Journals and rarely posted on Discussion Forums or replied to emails. I was graded unfairly once on one of my Written Assignments. I requested my instructor repeatedly in Learning Journals, emails, and Moodle messages to have a look at it, but alas she never replied.

The Discussion Forum and Written Assignments are worth 15% each (30% in total). The Learning Journals are worth 10%. There is no prescribed book for this course, and you learn everything through links. I must admit that the links were organized a bit poorly in the course and sometimes you don’t even know where or what to read to do your assignments. Most of the links were also broken and non-functional.

You have to write 8 Discussion posts and 4 Written Assignments. There is some break between the Written Assignments. But the schedule is very poorly organized that in the week of Graded Quizzes you have to write them. The Learning Journals are absolute torture in the class. You have to answer the same questions again and again for 8 weeks straight. It sounded more like questions from therapy sessions than an academic setting in my view. Some of the questions were like the following: How are you feeling this week? What surprised you? What are you realizing as a learner? How was your attitude this week?

The Graded Quizzes and Final Exam are worth 60% of the course in total. You have to take Graded Quizzes in the 4th and 7th weeks of the term. The Graded Quiz for unit 4 has only 10 questions and you have to do it in 30 mins. You have to answer 15 questions in the Graded Quiz for unit 7, and you get 45 mins to complete it. The Final Exam had 55 questions, and you get 80 mins to finish it, which in my opinion was more than enough. The Final Exam had mostly questions on UN programs, definitions, acronyms, diversity, sustainability, and ethics. All the questions on the Graded Quizzes and the final were fairly easy and came from the readings and Graded and non-Graded Quizzes and the Final Review Quiz. So, be sure to do all of them before you take the Graded Quiz or the Final Exam.

I think it’s a fairly lightweight course but a very disorganized one. Broken links, confusing reading instructions, and an absent instructor that didn’t care about unreasonable peer assessment were my only beef with the class.