About Teaching Business in the CSU
The California State University (CSU) recognizes that quality education and the professional development of its faculty must be immersed within the discipline and institutional culture and be governed by the faculty themselves. With these principles as a foundation, the CSU is collaboratively developing online resources and web-based services to enable faculty and students to be successful in their teaching and learning. MERLOT (www.merlot.org) was created in 1997 by the CSU to help faculty and students share high quality online content and pedagogy. Under the CSU's leadership, MERLOT has grown to an international consortium of education institutions, professional societies, digital libraries, and corporations (see taste.merlot.org/ for more information)
Building Locally, Linking Globally
The CSU is building on the efforts of local campus leaders within disciplines to develop communities of faculty who will discover, review, organize and disseminate exemplary practices for teaching and learning with technology. For example, San Francisco State University received a federal grant for infusing international business within college's curriculum and throughout the CSU. The challenges CSU faculty faces are:
- How do I create curriculum that will improve student learning and is recognized by my colleagues as “scholarship of teaching”?
- How do I not recreate high quality curriculum that has already been developed and used?
The Teaching Business in the CSU website is a locally governed website that leverages the larger Business and MERLOT communities. This illustration shows how the CSU faculty create and work within their local online community, resources, and collection but their work gets channeled as they see fit, into the larger business community and the even larger multidisciplinary MERLOT Community. The opportunity to participate in the communities that best serve their individual needs is what the current design will enable faculty to do. The MERLOT Business collection includes simulations, lectures, tutorials, case studies, drills and practice, quizzes/tests, reference materials and simulations in a variety of subject areas including Accounting, Business Law, E-Commerce, Economics, Finance, International Business, Marketing, Management, and Management Information Systems.
Bringing Our Purpose into Focus
Teaching Business in the CSU is a community of members-CSU faculty, staff, administrators-- that share a common interest in enhancing the quality of teaching and learning business disciplines with online resources. The mission of this site is to facilitate and support CSU business faculty by increasing their knowledge, productivity, and professional effectiveness through sharing of pedagogical best practices, digital learning materials, and by building an online CSU Teaching Business community.
Our strategy is to place the CSU Business community in the context of the larger international business discipline so that
- The curriculum is created in the context of the larger disciplinary community.
- The local faculty can easily search the larger disciplinary community for curriculum they can reuse (rather than reinvent).
The MERLOT Business Discipline Community also has its own portal which includes tips for teaching business, information about MERLOT Business Editorial Board and peer-review process, links to professional associations and journals, and search/browsing functions specific to the business disciplines.
CSU Business faculty can participate in the MERLOT Business Discipline Community in numerous ways:
- Join MERLOT and search the Member Directory for people like you.
- Contribute learning materials to the Business Discipline area.
- Contribute your own assignments to enhance existing modules.
- Provide “Member Comments associated with a material.
- Submit your article to JOLT (Journal of Online Learning and Teaching).
- Volunteer to be a peer reviewer in your discipline. Volunteer
- Create your own “Personal Collection” of favorite materials.
CSU Teaching Business Faculty Steering Committee
The CSU Teaching Business Faculty Steering Committee has been established to support the professional development of CSU Business faculty in their efforts to provide excellent academic programs for their students. The website is the first (and not only) means to provide this professional development services. more.