Current Business News Report: An Extra Credit Discussion

CURRENT BUSINESS NEWS (CBN) REPORT & DISCUSSION:  An Extra Credit Assignment

CBN discussions can be creative ways to develop your understanding of core business concepts and to share your knowledge with others. By the end of this course, you will have had ample exposure to fundamental business concepts through class discussion, coursework, and reading. Beyond the campus, and throughout your career, you should be able to apply your new and enhanced understanding of these concepts while addressing actual business problems or pursuing your own entrepreneurial projects. Your CBNs provide you with the chance to demonstrate, develop, and sharpen these capacities. These exercises require you to research relevant concepts; define, analyze and apply them; to summarize key points in your own words; and to ground those concepts in your own life/career experience. For that reason, the CBNs will strengthen your ability to transfer your knowledge from the classroom to the real world.

PROCESS FOR CBN REPORTS:

At the end of each textbook chapter, there is a box labeled “Key Terms.” Choose one of the chapters covered by the current course module, subject, or theme. For example, this course’s module on marketing includes Chapters 11 and 12. Select your key term from any one of those Chapters for your CBN assignment: Chapter 11, or Chapter 12. You are, however, encouraged (but not required) to demonstrate the depth of your understanding by incorporating more than one key term to show how the concepts relate to each other.

Choose one of the Key Terms in your chosen chapter and research online or written publications, and find a current news article that contains your chosen Key Term. An article is “current” if it was published within the last six months. Summarize the key term’s definition in two or three paragraphs. Then, in two or three paragraphs, provide your personal Comments. The ideal report should be about 650—700 words in length.

If you choose to create a short video or a record a slide presentation to share your report, please follow this format as closely as possible and contact your instructor for further guidance and tips. Your presentation should be no longer than 3—5 minutes. 

GRADING CRITERIA:

Everyone should aspire to earn 100% on their CBN reports. You should know, however that they will be strictly, but fairly graded under the assignment’s rubric criteria. These exercises are intended to develop your capacity to critically reflect on the reading assignments. You will be expected to demonstrate your ability to apply the key terms and concepts you encounter in a practical and reasoned way. Please comply with the formatting guidance below, and consult the example CBN report on next page.

1. Correct news report header information (must use listed ‘bold’ identifiers)  

• Name: (Your full name)
• CBN #____
• Submission Date: _______
• Article: (Title of article)
• Article Date: (Date of article)
• Article Source/Citation/Link: (Source of article)
• Chapter: (Chapter #)
• Key Term: (End of chapter key-term)

2. Use bold/capitalized/underlined sub-titles, i.e., SUMMARY and COMMENTS

• Leave a blank line after the header and between paragraphs.
• Define your Key Term
• 2—3-paragraph Summary (3—5 sentences per paragraph).
• 2—3 paragraph Comments (3—5 sentences per paragraph).
• Suggested length: 650—700 words

ONLINE RESOURCES: Remember: This assignment requires you to respond to “current” business news. You must therefore select an article that was published within six months of the CBN submission date. The source for your news article may be a newspaper, magazine, or online news source. One of the best approaches for finding relevant news journal articles is to consult your SCC librarians, who can show you how to use the research databases page Links to an external site.. If choose to do direct online news research, you must select your article from the following list of reliable sources:

1. You might start by going to the SCC home page at:  http://www.solano.eduand selecting the Library

   (in left menu tree) or go directly to the SCC Library at: http://www.solano.edu/library Links to an external site.

2. Go to “OneSearch.” Select "Find Articles" (“Quick Search” at bottom of page), then Business from dropdown menu, then select one of the databases to search a key term (use full text option for article).
   
   
3. All you need to login are a SCC or Solano County library card number.

4. This will bring you to the search page.
   
   

CURRENT BUSINESS NEWS ASSIGNMENT EXAMPLE

Name: JANE DOE

CBN # 1

Submission Date: 8/31/17

Article: Apple's Tim Cook Barnstorms for 'Moral Responsibility'

Article Date: August 28, 2017

Article Source/Citation/Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/business/dealbook/tim-cook-apple-moral-responsibility.html?mcubz=1 Links to an external site.

Chapter: 4

Key Term: Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

SUMMARY: Corporate social responsibility is the idea that businesses should be concerned with the welfare of society and not only for itself. Tim Cook states that this is especially important because the government has not worked as well as it should to provide what society needs quickly enough. It falls on corporations to improve society and give back where the government fails.

This article discusses how Tim Cook announced that Austin Community College will offer a curriculum developed by Apple on how to write code for iPhone apps. This was his way of using Apple as a platform to demonstrate corporate social responsibility. He also stated that Austin is just 1 of 30 community colleges that will be doing this. This article says that he is using Apple in order to venture into social issues, and that he wants to help grow the economy in order to further contribute to the country.

Apple is also one of the largest taxpayers in the country. Between the years 2014 and 2016, it has paid a large amount of $28 billion to the government. The company's corporate facilities have run on solar energy since 2011. It has also donated $100 million for infrastructure and a youth sports complex. Tim Cook said that he created the curriculum because he was passionate about the importance of education. Apple had paid $5 billion to app makers, so Tim Cook wants to encourage more people to learn how to code and create apps in order to profit as well. He specifically wanted to target community colleges because the courses offered in them tend to be more diverse than regular universities. The Swift language would be taught, which is what both the iPhone and iPad use.

COMMENTS: This article surprised me because I never really thought that Apple contributed all that much to society besides its expensive products for profit. Even if giving away money leads to tax breaks, it is good that it helps the people who receive that money and may benefit through an education.

I think that it is also a good thing that Apple went green and is running its facilities with renewable energy. It also shows that Cook believes in corporate social responsibility.

I admit that even though taking steps to use solar energy is a step in a good direction, I'm unsure of how much waste is caused by their devices. The devices that have become obsolete are thrown away. This disposal causes more of an environmental hazard than the process of using electronic products.

I am also a bit pessimistic of this curriculum because a lot of people can learn to code and use the Swift language and still not succeed in developing a good enough app for iPhone and iPad usage. Learning this type of programming code is an opportunity cost that these people will be taking instead of learning other types such as Java. Even though Cook says that these people can code and sell their apps specifically in the App Store for profit, I do not really see it as being too profitable considering how competitive the market seems to be for developers and app makers alike.