CMNS 112: Professional Writing

Teamwork and collaboration are valuable, if not mandatory, skills in the twenty-first century business environment and an important learning outcome for CMNS 1290. When on-campus classes at Thompson Rivers University (TRU) were suspended in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, team projects and oral presentations were temporarily eliminated from the syllabus as instructors scrambled to adapt their remaining winter term lectures and assignments to online delivery.

With little time between the end of winter semester and the beginning of the summer term, instructors continued to struggle with preparing their courses for online delivery as well as condensing their lectures from 14 weeks to seven weeks. Once again, teamwork and presentations were lost.  

Faced with the likelihood that fall and winter courses will also be delivered online, CMNS 1290 instructors must now plan to re-integrate team projects and oral presentations into their course outlines and are seeking input from students on the best, most effective, and most engaging ways to accomplish this task.

TRU’s Department of Journalism, Communication and New Media (JCNM) has issued a call for recommendations aimed at assessing different collaborative online learning tools that will allow CMNS 1290 students to work on a final project in virtual teams and deliver a team presentation to the entire class. The audience for your recommendation report is: Department of Journalism, Communication and New Media.

Please respond to this call for recommendations with a 1200-word Recommendation Report that researches, analyzes, and compares various online collaboration tools that will allow JCNM students to work in virtual teams. I want you to think of ways students can work together and write your report on one of the following:

1. How CMNS 1290 students can hold virtual team meetings in which to discuss, engage, and brainstorm problems and assignments and plan their final projects (this can include collaborative writing and editing tools)

- or -

2. How CMNS 1290 students can make a final team presentation (in any format) to the instructor and rest of the class

Our current learning management system (LMS) is Moodle, which has various capabilities such as audio and video tools, interactive white boards, and discussion forums. You’re welcome to analyze, discuss, and use any of the features in Moodle as comparisons. You can recommend the continued use of some of Moodle’s features if you think they are the most appropriate options; but I want you to look beyond what TRU is already using and find other technologies, platforms, or learning management systems that might be better than Moodle for different tasks and applications. Games and social media are acceptable options as long as you can justify their use for post-secondary learning.

Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each technology or platform you’re assessing in order to make thorough, educated comparisons and recommendations. You can express your personal preferences, but your opinions must be based on evidence from solid, expert sources and must acknowledge counterarguments. For example: