Greetings CBA Lions!
As stated in the provost's message, LMU has made the decision to move most courses online this fall. This strategy is aligned with public health guidelines and safety measures issued by the CDC and Los Angeles County.
The leadership in the CBA, along with our faculty, have agreed that all CBA courses will be online. PROWL now reflects that all CBA courses are online. Registration will reopen for students with course time conflicts on July 21 and for all students on July 22. Last night you received an email from the Office of the Registrar with more details.
I'd like to share why we believe “CBA Online” is essential for living our mission, ensuring your safety and preparing you for a changing business landscape.
Principles for Implementing “CBA Online”
In my conversations with employers, industry partners and C-suite leaders, I often ask how they are engaging with employees, customers and vendors in a virtual environment. I want to understand what knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) they need from our graduates during this period of uncertainty and change. These conversations - coupled with a CBA task force on best practices for online teaching and learning - resulted in the development of three guiding principles for implementing CBA Online:
- The Environment: How might we model the business landscape and create a culture of community in our virtual world?
- Empathy and Care: How might we provide a collaborative environment with a focus on relationships, team building and intimate distance?
- Best Practices: How might we ensure strong learning outcomes and deliver a high quality learning experience, both curricularly and extracurricularly?
Ensuring a Top-notch CBA Experience
All of us need to be highly skilled at conducting business in an online environment. These skills will be developed as you engage with faculty in class and during office hours, in virtual team projects, in online presentations, and in co-and extracurricular activities. Our societies and clubs continue to offer programming with great speakers, networking opportunities with alumni and employers, and “badging” to enhance your resume.
This fall, we're launching CBA Advantage, a mobile app that will enable you to develop an e-portfolio and track engagement, participation and learning in extracurricular and co-curricular activities. We built gamification into the app, offering incentives and awards for participation. However, the real advantage of the app is keeping you on track to further develop your KSAs and enhance your resume. We want you to be more competitive in the eyes of our employers. Career readiness for a new and changing business landscape is more important than ever before.
The Comparative Advantage
The faculty and staff in the CBA are committed to adopting an approach that models the business environment and develops the KSAs that business leaders are looking for. Employers want to see your agility and hear how you adapted during the global pandemic to further enhance your skills. Most importantly, they want to understand how you connect and make relationships work in the online space.
I look forward to connecting online with you this fall. My office hours will continue in my personal “Zoom Room” where you can share ideas and feedback on how things are going. We are all in this together and I am confident that your experience will be uniquely geared to today's business environment - with a commitment to deliver a mission-based education that will build new KSAs and resiliency.
All of us in the CBA strongly believe that the challenges we face are best met with “moral courage” and “creative confidence" - tenets of our college mission that will result in your personal and professional growth as future business leaders.
Sincerely,