Abstract:

According to recent a Babson (2016) study, one out of every three American college students are taken one or more online learning courses. The reasons for taking online courses versus traditional Face-to-Face (F2F) classes can range from time/scheduling issues, work and family issues, and the use of many new technologies in the adult learning environment. Consequently, today’s online educators have to learn and share new forms of technology and applications in order to help students complete all needed learning objectives and gain valuable content knowledge. In particular, today’s business communications courses, formerly Business English courses, demand students to have a stronger knowledge of formal academic and business writing. Further, students have to master the use of more technology and Internet usage than every before, especially with the proper creation, management, and interpretation of email messages and other forms of business communications. However, what happens when students are not required to attend a scheduled or video recorded class to share points, ideas, and/or assignments, such as presentations. Therefore, this presentation will focus on how one school requires students to create and present at least one pre-recorded presentation for the class academic requirements, as well as to share their final project with their classmates. Two options are given to the students to prepare these presentations either in a pre-recorded Power Point presentation or a YouTube presentation. After teaching this course for several semesters, the presenter will present the results of creating and delivering teaching strategies to motivate the students to become more invested and develop more “ownership” of their work product for the course with the use of newer web technologies.

Keywords:

Online learning, social media, YouTube, adult learning.