Designing an online business communication course in English by responding to student needs through an evidence-based approach

2.1 Course content

One obvious aspect of any course design is the choice of content. The content of a BCCE is influenced by a number of factors such as employers’ needs, changes in the discipline and changing landscape of the workplace or profession as reported in the literature (Bhatia & Bremner, 2012; Moshiri & Cardon, 2020; Wardrope & Bayless, 1999). As a result of these changes in both academic and professional contexts, BCCE continues to evolve globally (Bargiela-Chiappini & Zhang, 2013) due to the dominance of the English language in the business world where it serves as a lingua franca (Neeley, 2012). This means the content of a BCCE is inevitably influenced by how people use the English language in the business world (i.e., business English discourse) to get things done.

Broadly, a business communication course consists of both oral (e.g., individual presentation and discussions) and written (e.g., reports) communication components although the emphasis on one or the other has changed over the years as shown by a recent business communication course audit in the US (Moshiri & Cardon, 2020). While earlier courses tended to have content based on idealistic notions of business English and student needs, as argued by Bargiela-Chiappini and Zhang (2013), the most recent courses appear to draw on empirical research such as business discourse analysis conducted in organisations or workplaces. There are also many business English textbooks published by multinational publishers such as Pearson. However, these textbooks have often been criticised for the discrepancy between the authentic English business discourse found in business organisations and what is included in these textbooks (Bargiela-Chiappini, Nickerson, & Planken, 2007; Bargiela-Chiappini & Zhang, 2013; Bhatia & Bremner, 2012) although a limited number of corpus-informed Business English textbooks have been developed more recently.

The coverage of the actual business communication content has been researched by auditing available courses. These audit studies were primarily in the US in the last 50 years (Moshiri & Cardon, 2020; Wardrope & Bayless, 1999) and there seems to be no such detailed auditing elsewhere. According to these audits, the earlier BCCEs predominantly covered business writing such as reports and memos and gradually they started including oral presentations. Team communication or collaboration was sparsely taught. However, recent two national audit studies (Moshiri & Cardon, 2014, 2020), probably the most comprehensive to date, indicate that BCCEs in the US continue to cover business writing or written communication principally, followed by (oral) business presentations, teamwork or team communication, public speaking and interpersonal communication. According to Moshiri and Cardon (2014, p. 318), the most common types of written communication content included the following (presented in the order of highest to lowest coverage): Persuasive messages, Routine (or positive) messages, Cover letters and/or résumés, Bad-news (or negative) messages, Business proposals, Secondary research papers, Primary research papers, Public relations messages, Crisis messages and Business plans. Their updated 2020 study indicates that the BCCE content coverage has changed positively according to the authors as they include additional topics reflecting new developments in the business world: Organizational Communication, Corporate Communication, Handling Q&A, Ethics, Intercultural communication, Research papers, Corporate Social Responsibility, Diversity, Online presentations, Social media/Internet communication and Proposal and grant writing (Moshiri & Cardon, 2020, p. 3). Moshiri and Cardon (2020) also report BCCEs emphasising critical thinking and problem-solving. However, they indicate that existing BCCEs lacked topics on online or digital communication and the role of language in communication which is surprising. Likewise, there was also no mention of negotiations, a topic that is widely researched in business discourse studies (Bargiela-Chiappini et al., 2007; Bargiela-Chiappini & Zhang, 2013; Bhatia & Bremner, 2012; Koester, 2006).

The field of business communication in English is significantly influenced by business communication studies because the combination of English for business purposes and business communication studies appears to offer a better coverage of authentic business communication (Bhatia & Bremner, 2012) given their similar goals. Therefore, Bhatia and Bremner (2012) call for BCCEs to include aspects from both areas because language (such as English) is used to make meanings in a management education or business context and real business communication provides contexts for the English language to be meaningful and authentic, thereby preparing students for their real future workplace needs.

Despite the continuously evolving nature of BCCEs, they do not yet reflect the significant impact of local and global business cultures on business communication and the increased use of virtual communication. More importantly, the existing literature has little information about the nature of a BCCE for distance education.

2.2 Student needs analysis

Course content in BCCEs is determined by target students’ needs. Therefore, needs analysis has been a key aspect of a BCCE and it has been researched quite extensively in the field of English for specific purposes (ESP) (Basturkmen, 2010; Bhatia & Bremner, 2012; Flowerdew, 2013; Hellekjær & Fairway, 2015; Johns, 2013). Needs analysis refers to identifying the what and how of a course design. In the context of a BCCE, the what broadly entails the kind of English language and business communication skills needed in different business communication scenarios (e.g., writing a report on employees’ health and safety needs in the pandemic for senior managers, meetings) that students encounter. The how refers to the pedagogy used to deliver the course content. Needs analysis should also take into account students’ current knowledge, backgrounds and learning preferences. As this needs analysis process is dynamic, student needs are regularly examined to update the course. As such, in a review of needs analysis, Flowerdew (2013) states that the methods for needs analysis include, among others, expert intuition, participant observations, consultations with business academics, student surveys, workplace observations and genre analysis including corpus-based analysis.

The literature on student needs analysis is primarily related to ESP rather than business communication. As it is relevant, some key aspects are discussed here. The ESP literature shows that needs analysis may be driven by what students need in a target business communication context (target situation analysis) and what they lack or want (present situation analysis) (Flowerdew, 2013). While the early needs analysis focused on teacher intuition, later needs analysis approaches gather data from multiple sources including students and various contextual sources such as business communication in actual workplaces and business discourse corpora (Bhatia & Bremner, 2012; Koester, 2010).

One of the key needs analysis methods in ESP appears to be genre (text type) analysis whether in academic or professional contexts, especially influenced by the works of Swales in the academic context (e.g., Swales, 1990) and Bhatia in the professional context (e.g., Bhatia, 1993, 2004) (for an extended review of genre approaches see Bawarshi & Reiff, 2010). Genre is seen as a socially situated action with a shared communicative purpose. Various key text types from academic and professional contexts are analysed for their rhetorical moves (discourse structure) and lexicogrammar which writers use to achieve the social purpose of a text. These features are made ‘visible’ and taught in ESP courses. Conventionally, genre analysis focuses on texts. However, more recently the needs analysis in academic writing has been influenced by ethnographically-oriented academic literacies (Lea & Street, 1998; Lillis, 2001; Turner, 2011) and critical English for academic purposes (EAP) (Benesch, 2009). This means analysing wider institutional contexts and ideologies surrounding the text in question. Adopting this kind of needs analysis comes with challenges such as time and resource constraints and therefore, course designers may tend to focus on target texts only. It is worth noting that the ESP genre analysis has focused on needs of postgraduate international students rather than the general student population (as in this paper) in English medium higher education.

In addition to the ESP approach, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) pioneered by Halliday (1993, 1994 has influenced genre analysis to support disadvantaged learners (i.e., those who come from “working class” and low socio-economic backgrounds and may not have access to academic discourse unlike students from rich and middle class families) in schools and higher education through the works of SFL genre theorist Jim Martin and colleagues (e.g., Coffin & Donohue, 2014; Martin, 2009; Martin & Rose, 2007; Woodward-Kron, 2005). As SFL-informed the course design examined in this paper, it needs further explanation.

From an SFL perspective, language is viewed as a resource for making meaning in a particular social context. This means language helps to realise a social context through the choice of language used. In the SFL-based genre theory, genre is defined as “a staged, goal-oriented social process. Social because we participate in genres with other people; goal-oriented because we use genres to reach our goals” (Martin & Rose, 2007, p. 8). As Coffin and Donohue (2012, p. 66) explain, SFL-based genre theory draws on the concepts of register and genre in analysing academic texts, especially to describe and account for how language operates in academic contexts. While the notion of genre is used to map texts in a discipline according to their key purposes (e.g., arguing, describing, recounting etc.), register variables (field – subject matter, tenor – reader-writer relationship and mode – medium of communication) are deployed to understand the relationship between the sociocultural context of written or spoken texts and the lexicogrammatical choices in a text. The SFL genre analysis is also influenced by academic literacies in recent years as can be seen in some works in higher education which examine contexts beyond text through an ethnographic-oriented approach (e.g., Coffin & Donohue, 2014; Shrestha, 2020).

In most recent research on BCCE students’ needs, two additional aspects have been identified as essential for a course. They are oral business communication and intercultural or cross-cultural communication. A number of studies emphasise that a BCCE should include oral business communication beyond the oral presentation (e.g., “small talk”, daily routines) to enhance students’ employability (Cavanagh, Leeds, & Peters, 2019; Clokie & Fourie, 2016). Likewise, some studies strongly suggest the need for teaching business communication students cross-cultural communication which involves learning ways of communicating with people from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds (Angouri, 2018; Smallwood, 2020).

2.3 Course design approaches

A course design approach in this paper refers to the pedagogical decisions regarding the course including assessment. The body of existing ESP literature suggests that pedagogical practises are changing according to the context, purpose, student needs, available pedagogic support resources and assessment (Paltridge & Starfield, 2013). The needs analysis informs what kind of pedagogical approaches need to be adopted in the course which may subsequently determine any pedagogy and assessment. For example, as discussed in Section 2.2, genre analysis has been dominant in needs analysis and thus genre-based pedagogies have been influential in ESP teaching and learning too, especially in EAP and academic writing (Hyland, 2007; Wingate, 2018). The genre pedagogy typically adopts a task-based learning approach and focuses on different aspects of a target genre (e.g., a workplace proposal) such as its discourse moves and the type of lexicogrammatical resources required to produce it. It also makes learners aware of the context where the genre is used instead of just looking at the text product. In genre-based pedagogies, the kind of discourse moves and the required language use are explicitly taught to students so that they can acquire the target genre (Hyland, 2003; Paltridge, 2013). In addition to genre acquisition, some scholars suggest that genre-based pedagogies should raise students’ genre awareness by providing them with strategies to respond to new genre tasks and situations (Cheng, 2007; Johns, 2008). The ESP-oriented genre pedagogy does not seem to advocate any particular pedagogical approach.

The SFL-based genre pedagogy, however, has a clearly defined pedagogical approach originally called the Teaching and Learning Cycle (TLC) in the 1980s (for details on its development, see Rose & Martin, 2012). This pedagogy was developed to explicitly teach school children how to write the identified genres in a particular school year. The pedagogical approach was mainly based on Halliday’s and Painter’s SFL-based language development studies (Rose & Martin, 2012). Only later (i.e., turn of the century and early 2000) was Vygotsky’s notion of “zone of proximal development” (ZPD, i.e., learning potential) brought into the development of SFL-based pedagogy which emphasises dialogue in teaching and learning (e.g., Gibbons, 2002, 2006; Hasan, 2005a, 2005b; Martin, 1999). Viewing it as a genre, this pedagogical approach (i.e., TLC) has three distinct stages: Deconstruction, Joint Construction and Independent Construction. At the Deconstruction stage, the teacher introduces a model text of the target genre and discusses its sociocultural context, generic stages and lexicogrammatical features. The Joint Construction stage involves the teacher and their students jointly constructing (writing) another text in the same genre in the classroom (or online). The final stage, Independent Construction requires students writing a text in the same genre on their own (e.g., at home). In all these three stages, building the field and setting the context are central. The key purpose of the approach is to enable students to take control of the target genre so that they can write it and critically reflect on its role.

Assessment needs to be central to any course design and its pedagogy. One may argue that assessment in BCCE is the same as in other language assessment. However, due to the specific nature of language use and communication contexts, the construct we assess can be very complex and challenging, and what assessment criteria we use to assess BCCE students may be debatable as contended by Douglas (2013) in the context of ESP. Yet, it can be argued that the construct to be assessed and the criteria need to be derived from the business communication course context.

In addition to genres and their contexts, as argued by Flowerdew (2013), pedagogical decisions need to consider the use of educational technologies and globalisation in BCCE, especially for distance education. As an emerging area of research, there is only a limited amount of research on the use of technologies in BCCE (though see White, 2017 for online second language learning) but some studies show the positive impact mobile learning has on student learning (e.g., see Knight, 2017). Globalisation is relevant to this paper as distance education students come from around the world and they bring different identities and profiles as a learner which affects the course design. However, both technologies and globalisation are under-researched in the context of BCCEs.

4.1 Research context

Learning and teaching in open and distance education (The OU in this case) is significantly different from traditional universities (Chetwynd & Dobbyn, 2011). Therefore, it is essential to understand how teaching and learning takes place in such a context. Unlike in other universities, students in the OU have limited or no face-to-face contact with their teacher or their fellow students during the course of their studies because face-to-face tutorials are provided in a limited number. Online tutorials are increasingly becoming the norm in most of the OU courses. In terms of the study materials, all undergraduate courses provide all materials online even when there is also a printed book. While some courses continue to provide students with printed books, many courses now offer only limited materials in print and most of the materials online on a dedicated course website. The OU courses run for 6–9 months each year. Each course has its own course team that consists of academic (a course chair and two or more other academics), administrative and production (i.e., editor, online support) staff. Designing and running a course always involves collaborative teamwork across different units in the OU. Each course has a number of tutors depending on the number of students enrolled. An OU tutor, officially called Associate Lecturer, has 16 to 20 students in their group for tutorials and assessment marking. The tutor has contact with students via a private online forum called Tutor Group Forum within the course website, custom-built on the Moodle platform. This online forum is used to build a community and for students to carry out learning activities in small groups. The tutor also uses email and telephone to contact their students. For tutorials, each tutor uses an online room (currently Adobe Connect^®) at different points in the course; this offers students and their tutor opportunities to discuss anything related to the course in real-time.

Assessment in the OU is primarily conducted through the written mode except in Languages courses. Each course contains 2–6 Tutor Marked Assignments (TMAs). TMAs spread across the course and each TMA assesses a certain topic area. The TMA is designed not only to assess what students have learned in the course but also provide formative feedback that students can use in their subsequent assignments (TMAs) (Chetwynd & Dobbyn, 2011).

The data reported in this paper comes from an undergraduate business communication course in English (UBCCE) for business management at The OU Business School (OUBS). UBCCE is a 30 credit point (300 h) optional course offered to all undergraduate OUBS students. It was recently re-designed to replace its predecessor and the author chaired the production of this course. This course has a dual purpose of supporting students with communication needs in management education and in the workplace. The predecessor course (pre-UBCCE henceforth) was primarily book-based (six books) with online only tutorials. It had a relatively low student satisfaction rate compared to other language courses due to the amount, nature and organisation of the content, and its heavy focus on academic study. Additionally, it had issues with its assessment strategy. Despite all this, students progressed well and it continued to recruit a high number of students (circa 700 each year on average for 10 years). A successor course was needed which meant understanding student needs in OUBS as much as possible. This led to adopting an evidence-based approach to the course design, thus necessitating student needs analysis which is an essential aspect of course design in the field of ESP (e.g., Bargiela-Chiappini et al., 2007; Basturkmen, 2012). An evidence-based approach to the course design requires gathering evidence for course content, the nature of teaching and learning, assessment and the delivery of the course in relation to student needs both in their academic studies and professional contexts. For this evidence-based approach, multiple data collection methods were needed as explained below. All data was collected following institutional ethical guidelines.

4.2 Data collection

4.3 Data analysis

The data was analysed in different ways, depending on the data type. The data from the surveys (pre-UBCCE student survey and UBCCE evaluation) were analysed using descriptive statistics to examine frequencies and central tendencies following Roever and Phakiti (2018).

Two OUBS undergraduate courses were scanned for the topics covered in business management and the type of teaching/leaning activities which could be reflected in UBCCE. Importantly, an SFL-based analysis of the assignment task briefs in the two modules examined was conducted to identify prompted genre types. The analysis provides information about the kind of texts (spoken or written) students are expected to produce in their studies and the kind of language resources they need to succeed in producing them. Genre analysis is a common practice in ESP (see Section 2.2), and academic and professional writing research and pedagogy (e.g., Bhatia & Bremner, 2014; Coffin & Donohue, 2014; Nesi & Gardner, 2012; Ravelli, 2004). The genre analysis approach was informed by Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), especially the works of Martin and Rose (2007) and Rose and Martin (2012). The SFL view of genre provides information about the social context of language use and the lexicogrammatical resources used to construe the intended meaning making as discussed in Section 2.2. Each genre such as arguing follows stages to achieve its goal. For example, exposition as an arguing genre which argues for a point has these stages: Thesis^ Argument^ Reiteration. The analysis of assignment briefs for prompted genres provides insights into the type of writing texts business students are expected to produce in business management (for more details, see Shrestha, 2020).

The forum posts and the open comments in the surveys were thematically analysed broadly following Braun and Clarke (2006). Themes were identified based on their “keyness” in relation to the research questions rather than their frequency. This means a deductive method (top down) was used for this purpose to understand students’ needs based on their experiences.

5.1 Student needs analysis

5.1.2 Course format

It is worth noting that the pre-UBCCE was criticised by students for having too many books. In light of this criticism, it was essential to strike a balance between printed, audio-video and online materials. To identify potential student needs in this respect, the survey asked a few questions about the format of the pre-UBCCE and what they preferred.

In response to “You are studying pre-UBCCE with books and integrated online activities. There is a possibility to make UBCCE less book-based and more online-based. Which format do you prefer?”, the participating students responded: existing format (59%), more online but one book (34%) and no preference (5%). They were then asked “How easy to use did you find the existing pre-UBCCE material format?” and the responses were: very easy (13%), easy (31%), neither easy nor difficult (33%), difficult (22%) and very difficult (1%). The next question was “How useful did you find the pre-UBCCE material format?” to which the respondents made these choices: very useful (26%), useful (47%), neither useful nor useless (22%), useless (3%) and very useless (3%). There was a question about online activities: “How useful did you find the online activities?”. The responses were very useful (21%), useful (33%), neither useful nor useless (24%), useless (17%) and very useless (5%). Finally, they were asked “To study in general, which do/would you prefer?”. Figure 1 shows the result for this question in which 1 is the most preferred option and 4 the least preferred. As the figure shows, the students still wanted printed books (66%) although a large majority (76%) preferred a combination of printed and online materials.

Figure 1:

Preference for the format of the study materials.

The survey data was supported by the forum post data. While a number of forum posts suggested continuing with printed books, many also indicated the need for more online presence of the course. The quotes below illustrate the student preferences for print and online in response to the question “How much study material do you prefer to be printed and online?”:

I find the good old text books the best format for learning, you can smell them, scribble on them and draw lines and arrows until your heart is content. The live online I have experienced for the first time on this module and must admit I was impressed with the connection and interaction. (Forum post 2)

I know how difficult it is for you when you have to keep skipping through the books by reading the individual sessions then referring to the resource book then back to the answers at the back of the session books. I also find it difficult as I have paralysis in both of my hands – although I do have a non medical helper courtesy of the OU. I personally prefer the OU online sessions as a disabled student. (Forum post 5)

I find online and PDF formats more useful. I personally prefer this. I do travel frequently and carrying books or printed materials are not practical. Having these on your iPAD is very convenient when you are mobile. (Forum post 13)

The following forum post sums up the majority of the forum posts:

I understand the need for both online and printed material.

Depending on what can be done to make the printed version run more logically I would be pushing for more material online to compliment this.

I agree with the “scribbling”, “touch and feel” commentary regarding the books, however with an appropriate guide this can be done online and saved with any annotations made.

In conclusion for me it’s a blend of both but an increased percentage online. (Forum post 35)

Given that the course is offered globally and increasingly younger students under the age of 30, unlike traditional mature OU students, are studying OUBS courses (including pre-UBCCE), there was an impetus for an online orientation to the new course. The younger age of the student population in the pre-UBCCE (e.g., 51.3% of 774 pre-UBCCE students in 2015 aged between 17 and 30) also indicated a preference for online learning due to their use of smart devices such as tablets in daily lives.

The format of the UBCCE was also informed by the OUBS level 1 compulsory course. As the majority of the students come from this course to the UBCCE, it was important to offer similar experience to the students in order to minimise the information load. The OUBS course was primarily online-based with seven printed books for readings. All the teaching and learning activities including audio and video materials were online. This means a blend of both online and print materials. Based on this OUBS course format and the pre-UBCCE student preferences (survey and forum post data), the UBCCE was designed to be primarily online-based with two printed books which replicated part of the online materials. The printed books included case studies, examples of case study analysis texts written by students, theoretical models and frameworks, useful tips on business communication, glossary and audio-video transcripts. The hub of teaching/learning in the course is the course website which contains the course calendar and links to all the learning resources. A summary of the types of learning resources used in the course is presented in Figure 2.^[2]

Figure 2:

Types of resources in UBCCE.

5.2 Student experiences of the new online course

As a new online course, we constantly strive to improve it through regular student feedback. The feedback also shows how much it has achieved its objective of meeting business communication needs of distance education students. The student experience of the new course was gathered through two student surveys: one course end evaluation in 2019 and another mid-course evaluation in 2020. The course end survey focused on various aspects of the module and the student satisfaction rate. In total, 76 students responded to the 2019 survey and their satisfaction rate is provided in Table 5.

As can be seen in Table 5, students were highly satisfied with most aspects of the course. Only interaction with peers was rated low which is not surprising in distance education due to the independent nature of distance learners.

The survey data was supplemented by some open comments. The anonymous comments below reflect the positive impact on student needs and thus indicate the potential success of the course:

This course has given me a range of skills that will last a lifetime and would most certainly have helped me at the outset of my studies with the OU. This module gives you the framework and tools on how to communicate successfully in an academic arena and with work-based situations. I would suggest this is used as part of any foundation or core modules to any qualification with the OU.

I work as a quality and compliance manager – since I started this module I feel more confident when communicating to others.

I enjoyed every bit of this module and will recommend it to anyone who has a very tight schedule in their daily activities as employees or entrepreneurs. Thanks so much to the OU team for such a fantastic learning program.

The mid-course survey took place approximately halfway through the course. Specifically, it asked students questions about the effect of Assignment 1 on Assignment 2 writing, online tutorial experience, and support with writing assignments in other modules as a result of studying UBCCE. In total, there were 232 responses. In response to “Assignment 1 was designed to help you prepare for Assignment 2. Did writing Assignment 1 and receiving tutor feedback on it help you with Assignment 2?”, 87% responded “yes”. When asked “What has been your experience of online tutorials so far?”, 65% indicated that they are very useful for writing assignments while 28% did not attend for personal reasons or due to work schedule. Finally, they were asked “Has this course supported you with writing assignments in other courses you are studying?”. In their answer, 68% responded positively.