Virtual reality (VR) has emerged as a promising technology for training oral communication skills (OCS), resulting in a rapidly growing body of research. We conducted a systematic review of 57 studies (2013–2025) mapping OCS types, communication contexts, and key variables, and introduce a conceptual model to guide future research and practice. Findings reveal that current VR-based OCS training captures only a small part of oral communication. Expanding the Cognitive Affective Model of Immersive Learning (CAMIL), we highlight the need for stronger theoretical and pedagogical foundations by exploring cognitive-affective mediators (e.g., cognitive load) and learner-related moderators (e.g., learning styles).

Purpose: Writing has been identified as an important skill. Business writing refers to the form of writing that is used to communicate in formal settings in various corporations and organizations. A number of research studies have identified writing as a crucial skill that needs to be developed by students. The purpose of the study is therefore to understand how an experiential learning module on business writing can improve the email-writing and report-writing skills of management postgraduates. Design/Methodology/Approach: The study uses an experimental research methodology based on experiential learning pedagogy to obtain the results of the intervention on the business writing skills of the management postgraduate students. The module was developed by the researcher and then was taught to the students through the online platform Zoom. Pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest analysis was conducted to find the impact of the intervention. The students were evaluated by an industry expert to avoid bias as they were trained by the researcher. Findings: The results of the study indicated that the intervention had a significant impact on the business writing skills of the participants. The results of the component analysis also indicated a large effect on the content, persuasive abilities, lateral thinking abilities, and the interpersonal skills of the participants in written communication. The analysis of the test scores revealed that an initial training based on the experiential learning methods can have a long-term impact on the improvement of the skills of the students, as the delayed posttest results were more than the posttest results. Originality/value: The study will be beneficial to educators, trainers, as well as students in understanding how experiential learning can impact the business writing skills of the students.

This study examines the role of positive communication in AI-generated recruitment messaging and its influence on Generation Z job seekers. Drawing on positive communication scholarship (Mirivel & Fuller, 2024) and the Human Needs Approach (Socha & Beck, 2015), we explore how AI-generated job descriptions shape anticipatory socialization and perceptions of workplace culture. Using qualitative focus groups, we identify key themes related to authenticity, engagement, and the fulfillment of fundamental psychological needs. Findings indicate that although positive communication enhances job attractiveness, job seekers remain skeptical of AI-generated content unless it aligns with real-world workplace values. Organizations must balance AI efficiency with human oversight to maintain trust and ensure transparency in recruitment messaging. This study contributes to business communication research by offering practical and pedagogical implications for AI-integrated hiring strategies and ethical recruitment communication.

This article reframes professional networking through the lens of positive communication, arguing that authentic, value-driven relationship building enhances both personal well-being and professional growth. Drawing on positive psychology, emotional intelligence, and moral development, it highlights how empathy, gratitude, and identity alignment transform networking from a transactional act into a relational, self-actualizing practice. The article offers a pedagogical framework for instructors, including a multisession unit to help students internalize and practice positive communication principles. Ultimately, this approach fosters deeper, more fulfilling connections that empower students to become confident, ethical professionals capable of sustaining meaningful, high-quality relationships throughout their careers.

This article presents critical positive communication pedagogy (CPCP), which synthesizes the fields of critical pedagogy and positive communication pedagogy to promote positive communication practices that develop a social justice sensibility among students. We argue that CPCP contributes to the creation of learner-centered classrooms that promote interpersonal connection, foster feelings of inclusion and belonging, and aid students in achieving sustainable happiness. We provide examples of CPCP in business and professional communication classrooms to promote diversity and inclusion, specifically related to issues of gender and sexuality, race, disability, and class.

This study evaluates a “feedback-only,” constrained-generative AI tool designed to support revision without generating or rewriting student text. StoryCoach was developed for a business communication elective and grounded in cognitive apprenticeship with principles of feedback literacy. The tool generated structured feedback: one strength, one opportunity, and one reflective question per submission. Analysis of 57 paired drafts showed significant gains in feature-specific rhetorical execution, with vividness as the primary quantitative indicator (Cohen’s d  = 1.39), supported by independent reader judgments and student reflections. Findings demonstrate that constrained-generative AI can function as a pedagogical partner that strengthens rhetorical awareness and preserves authorship integrity.

This study examines how metaphor and gender interact in venture capital pitches. We analyzed 60 pitches from a global competition, comparing metaphor usage between male and female winners and non-winners. Results show distinct metaphor preferences: male entrepreneurs used more BUILDING metaphors, while female entrepreneurs used more WAR and PLANT metaphors. The association between WAR metaphors and female winners suggests strategic metaphorical framing interacts with gender to impact persuasion. These findings reveal that gender norms influence decision making, and entrepreneurs can leverage metaphor to construct persuasive advantages, providing strategic and pedagogical direction for refining their figurative language in practice and training.

This mixed-methods study investigates the development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) among Bangladeshi university students through the creation of online advertisements for products like tea, kettles, and mango drinks. Grounded in the frameworks of Ertay and Gilanlioglu’s multidimensional ICC scale, Kress and van Leeuwen’s social semiotics, and Dooly’s asynchronous interculturality, the research examines how student-made ads serve as cultural texts that manifest evolving ICC. Quantitative results from 90 participants revealed significant disparities in self-assessed ICC, with Attitude scoring highest (71%) and Awareness lowest (54%). Longitudinal analysis of 60 students showed Language Appropriateness improved most (37%, p  < 0.01), while Visual Cultural Cues showed minimal gains (18%, p  = 0.08), indicating a cultural bias in visual literacy development. Pedagogically, advertisement creation supported by a structured ICC rubric yielded significantly higher competence gains (29%) than case studies or ad creation alone. Qualitative findings illuminated the challenges students faced in negotiating “glocal” identities and the emotional labor of cultural mediation. The study concludes that student-generated advertisements are potent pedagogical artifacts for ICC development but require tailored, critically reflective scaffolding to address contextual biases and effectively prepare students for the demands of global digital business communication.

This study investigates how the linguistic style of CEO digital communication influences audience engagement. Using an NLP pipeline with a panel regression model on a data set of 19,566 tweets from CEOs, this study reveals that linguistic clarity and an on-platform focus are the most robust predictors of engagement; syntactic complexity and the inclusion of external URLs consistently deter engagement metrics. The effects of stylistic choices like emojis and hashtags are less consistent and depend on the type of engagement being measured. These results offer an expanded understanding of digital communication for CEOs and provide direct implications for business communication pedagogy.

A customized chatbot and structured interactions with ChatGPT were integrated into professional business communication pedagogy to foster critical reading, evaluative judgment and independent writing skills. The iterative-experiential learning feature of AI was utilized. AI (the chatbot and ChatGPT) was conceptualized as an assistant, coach, and provocateur in learning rather than a shortcut to bypass effort. The effectiveness of the intervention was explored through students’ reflections and learning experiences. The findings suggest that AI interventions for developing critical reading and writing skills can enhance traditional pedagogies and the learning curve. Implications and limitations of the study were also discussed.

This review analyzes 59 studies from 2014 to 2024 examining design thinking integration in professional communication pedagogy across eight disciplinary journals. Design thinking has evolved from experimental use to systematic pedagogical approaches, with assignment-level integration proving most viable for educators. Empathy interviews and user research bridge design thinking principles with communication pedagogy’s audience awareness focus. Students show enhanced empathy, improved collaboration, and increased creative confidence with high motivation levels. Implementation challenges include time constraints, student resistance to ambiguity, and assessment difficulties. The study recommends scaffolded introduction, integration with existing content, and institutional support for desirable implementation in business and professional communication pedagogy.

Communication scholars have done an excellent work in creating business simulations to engage the students in learning communication concepts. However, more can be done to foster interactive business and professional communication pedagogy. Instructors must continue to devise new ways to enable the students to apply business communication concepts. In response to these calls, this article presents an example of a simulation based within the Harry Potter universe that emphasizes the ways team communication and proposal presentation manifest themselves in business speaking practices. This simulation enables students to engage with team communication issues by understanding persuasion and influence as an essential part of business and professional communication.

This article examines how artificial intelligence is transforming instructor-student communication and student evaluation in higher education. By comparing traditional and AI-mediated communication practices, the study synthesizes current literature on opportunities, challenges, and ethical considerations. The analysis highlights the need for digital literacy, emotionally intelligent AI tools, and balanced pedagogical strategies. Practical and theoretical propositions are provided to guide educators in leveraging AI while preserving human-centered teaching values.

Internationally operating business professionals communicate using English as a business lingua franca (BELF), which differs from “standard” English usage, leading to calls for innovations in business English (BE) pedagogy. However, how BE instructors incorporate BELF research findings in the classroom remains unexplored. Therefore, in this mixed methods explanatory sequential study, we used a questionnaire and semistructured interviews to collect data from BE instructors who had been exposed to BELF research. The findings revealed that while the exposure to BELF raised their awareness and understanding, there remain contextual, theoretical, and mindset-based obstacles to implementing BELF principles in the classroom.

This study presents a dual bibliometric analysis of business communication research. Study 1 analyzes 135 publications from the Web of Science (1993-2024) to map global trends in communication and pedagogy within business education. Study 2 focuses on 328 articles from Business and Professional Communication Quarterly , offering journal-specific insights. Key themes include soft skills, AI literacy, digital communication, and experiential learning. The study highlights how global trends are reflected and extended within a leading journal. Findings offer valuable implications for educators, researchers, and curriculum developers seeking to align communication instruction with evolving academic and professional demands.

Purpose: This study offers an in-depth review of the body of research articles on the topic of boundary spanning and the dynamic nature of different actors to provide a more comprehensive knowledge on different boundary spanning activities and their effects on performance, flexibility, and resilience in educational institutions. Design/methodology/approach: To address the limited research on boundary-spanning functions in education, this study employed a two-round systematic literature review (SLR). The first round, which included an analysis of 338 research studies, sought to identify boundary-spanning functions and their activities. Using data from 39 studies, the second round sought to examine the boundary-spanning function and the critical role that information transfer plays in enabling boundary spanning in education. Findings: This review of literature led researchers to draw the main variables/strategies that facilitate boundary spanning in education (leadership and instructional strategies; collaboration and networking; training and development; teamwork; and revised pedagogical approaches). Also, the review highlighted the importance of knowledge transfer in facilitating boundary-spanning functions. Originality/value: Researchers, practitioners, and decision makers looking to improve boundary-spanning activities by utilizing networks and knowledge transfer might use this systematic review as a source. It also provides various strategies of how boundary spanners and leaders can support and facilitate the function of boundary spanning in educational institutions.

The study examines the communication difficulties faced by employees in work-from-home (WFH) environments and the impact these obstacles have on business communication education. The research employs focus groups and interviews to identify three main obstacles: ambiguous job responsibilities, decreased trust, and a lack of social cohesion resulting from decreased in-person encounters. The study highlights important pedagogical factors, such as promoting virtual professional and social connections, managing the balance between excessive and unclear communication, and providing training in virtual collaboration tools. The suggestion is to include WFH-specific communication skills in curriculum, recognizing the growing probability of future distant job assignments for students. The study highlights the significance of providing employees with the essential communication skills to achieve good performance when working from home, as firms adopt remote work.

This developmental article presents a case for narrative inquiry, and fiction in particular, to be considered as an important pedagogic mode that informs business communication pedagogy. The article uses two illustrative exemplars from Herman Melville and Chinua Achebe. Informed by the frame of critical pedagogy, signature pedagogy, and narrative medicine, this developmental article argues that fiction expands the narrative imagination of learners of business communication, enabling sensitive and compassionate managers for the future. The article seeks to demonstrate the strength of narrative, especially fiction, for students of management as essentially shaping future managers into holistically developed, ethically conscious, empathic managers with competency for emotional self-regulation. As a move toward sustaining business communication on the fulcrum of a humanities philosophy, this article will demonstrate the advantages of the terrain of narrative inquiry in business classrooms as enabling life skills like compassion, empathy, and altruism, all central tenets of being human. With an increased significance attributed to skills like empathy, resilience, and flexibility as future competencies to be built, we argue that a conscious interjection of narrative ethics in an emphatic manner into business communication curriculum can expand learners’ narrative imagination competency. To this effect, the paper also proposes an instructional framework that serves to advance DELTAs (Distinct Elements of Talent) through the use of fiction that covers significant units of a Business Communication course.

This article presents a curated collection of eight teaching innovations presented at the Association for Business Communication 89th conference Tulsa, Oklahoma, as well as online, in October 2024. These MFA presenters demonstrated teaching ideas specifically on improving students’ writing skills, and this My Favorite Assignment 32nd edition introduces readers to these classroom approaches in teaching business writing. Teaching support materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, rubrics, frequently asked questions, links, and sample student projects—are downloadable from the Association for Business Communication website.

The problem of discourse marginalization in intercultural meetings is usually attributed to linguistic or pragmatic shortcomings of marginalized second language English speakers who are seen as either “learners,” in contrast to first-language English speakers, as uncommunicative, or even as professionally incompetent. The influence of culturally oriented participation styles, distinct patterns of turn-taking behavior, has so far not been considered as a contributing factor. The present study examines intercultural meeting discourse and reveals how diverse participation styles can lead to marginalization. Pedagogical implications are discussed.

Drawing upon a framework of “assemblage thinking,” this article offers an approach to considering artificial intelligence (AI) and ethics that seeks to think relationally across the positions occupied as educators and students at a business school. To complement discussions of assemblage and examinations of ethics in the AI era, we draw upon the perspectives of a relatively understudied population in this conversation—students themselves navigating AI and writing within a business-focused context—and extend assemblage thinking to capture important thought toward the future of business communication, pedagogy, ethics, and AI.

The public release of ChatGPT in 2022 ushered in a new era, affirming the present reality of AI-assisted writing and the critical role business instructors play in preparing students. This study presents the results of a pedagogical experiment. Specifically, it evaluates strategies for integrating and teaching about AI in the business communication classroom, focusing on the impact of generative AI on students’ understanding of business writing principles and how different levels of engagement with AI influence students’ critical AI literacy and attitudes toward AI-assisted writing in the workplace.

This article presents a conceptual framework for enhancing business writing skills through social media integration in business communication education. By embedding platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter, the framework promotes essential competencies such as clarity, audience awareness, and professional tone. Five core principles—constructivist learning, digital literacy, ethical writing practices, real-time feedback, and collaborative writing—underpin this framework, emphasizing experiential learning that bridges informal and formal communication styles. This approach offers educators a structured method for developing students’ adaptability and writing proficiency, aligning pedagogical practices with the evolving needs of modern business communication.

This study explores how confidence levels in user prompts affect AI-generated resume text. Using six varied prompts for AI models ChatGPT-3.5, Gemini, and Perplexity, it examines how AI interprets and responds to different confidence levels. The findings reveal significant differences in AI-generated resumes based on prompt confidence, highlighting the need to adapt resume pedagogy for the AI age. Emphasizing the importance of teaching genre conventions and developing critical AI literacies, the study offers practical recommendations for integrating AI tools into resume writing instruction to better prepare students for an increasingly digital world.

Generative AI could disrupt professional writing instruction, but banning AI tools seems unproductive. This article outlines a rhetorical approach for adapting business writing instruction for the AI age: It suggests AI use cases that align with the rhetorical canons, illustrates each with real-world business examples, and ends with suggestions for using AI to build students’ critical genre awareness. This approach should prove useful for business writing instructors who want to ground their AI-related instruction in enduring pedagogical theory.

In a case study involving three asynchronous online professional writing courses, this research investigates students’ abilities to establish a social presence and build team cohesion via collaborative, team-based writing projects. Using the Community of Inquiry (COI) framework, this study is situated in the understanding that teaching and learning in higher education are not about the mere transmission of knowledge but that “teaching and learning are inherently interactive” as the terms of “community” and “inquiry” used in the framework suggest. Prior researchers have also established a clear connection between one element of the COI framework— social presence and student satisfaction in online courses. Findings from this study indicate participation in collaborative team assignments contributes to team cohesion and positively affects students’ ability to establish their social presence within online environments as well as transfer their knowledge to other contexts.

This My Favorite Assignment (MFA) article features 11 teaching innovations first presented at the 2023 Association for Business Communication Annual International Conference held Denver, Colorado, USA. These assignments are designed to boost students’ writing, persuasion, crisis management skills, and personal and professional development.

The article discusses the impact of text-generative AI in business communication pedagogy. The onset of open AI, such as ChatGPT, has the potential to transform the way faculty and students approach oral and written professional business communication. Through focus group discussions and netnography, the study employs content analysis to evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) of integrating AI in the teaching-learning process of business communication in a postgraduate management program. The article strives to reimagine the pedagogical tools and techniques regarding pre-reading assistance, classroom materials, assignments, evaluation, and other learning aids of business communication courses in response to the developments in text-generative AI.

Artificial intelligence assignments lead this article’s 11 teaching innovations selected from the My Favorite Assignments presented at the 2023 Association for Business Communication’s Annual International Conference held in Denver, Colorado. USA. Pedagogy presented here also includes ideas to enhance student engagement and techniques to transform learning via gamification.

Using an evaluative approach within a professional communication service course, we used student documents and instructor feedback to uncover how students and instructors were understanding the rhetoric student learning outcome (SLO). Because rhetoric is central to the course, our driving questions were, Can we locate language that actualizes the rhetoric SLO in student documents? How does faculty feedback articulate the rhetoric SLO to facilitate effective revision? Overall, we found that whether identifying rhetoric in student documents or instructor feedback, the interpretation was varied and opens up room in pedagogical practices. We offer three implications for teaching: enhancing attention to teaching rhetoric, improving assignment design, and focusing on professional development for faculty.

Currently, the analysis of rhetorical moves is extensively applied to business genre conventions. This paper adopts a corpus-assisted genre approach to compare three major rhetorical moves in corpora of students’ and professionals’ project proposal abstracts to elicit evidence-based recommendations for the pedagogy of business communication. The findings indicate that, while overall features in the proposal abstracts written by actual business professionals and those by students of business vary quantitatively but not qualitatively, students focus more on the aim of the project, and professionals tend to evenly highlight all sides of the project and position it within the context.

Despite management theorists’ decades-long attention to the robust sustainability of complex organizations, adaptive management practices remain undertheorized. Management is evolving from a hierarchically organized effort in pursuit of strategically determined goals into a facilitation of layered, distributed, autonomous agents able to learn from their errors and ensure the entire system’s long-term survivability. A rhetorical perspective on pedagogy allows us to better prepare our students for success in the 21st century’s adaptive organization as well as contribute to theoretical scholarship of effective organizations.

This essay discusses the need and the value of explicitly integrating rhetoric within the business classroom setting; introduces basic rhetorical structures that enhance the workplace skill set; identifies the significance of topoi in the business and professional communication classroom pedagogy; and provides an example of the practical application of using topoi as a pedagogical construct in the business and professional communication classroom.

Business and professional communication courses hold special opportunities to contribute to students’ development of entrepreneurial mindsets through the use and extension of classical rhetorical theory and praxis. We situate pedagogical activities within the context of the entrepreneurial venture pitch by using Rhetorical Canons of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery to develop oral discourse while recognizing and developing entrepreneurial mindsets. We utilize elements of entrepreneurial mindset development presented by Kuratko et al. and Daspit et al. to introduce business and professional communication instructors to cognitive, behavioral, and emotional aspects contributing to the establishment of entrepreneurial mindsets.

As a business communication teacher walks into their classroom ready to introduce a wonderful new teaching object, they are riding on a wave of spiritual joy. They know that they are about to transport their students into new business communication skills. It’s magical. My Favorite Assignment is Association for Business Communication’s (ABC’s) resource of classroom-tested pedagogical innovations. This article offers 10 teaching innovations first presented at the 2022 ABC Annual International Conference held in Tampa, Florida USA. Readers can select from assignments designed to teach email, personal and professional development, and social media.

Business communication teachers navigate a constantly changing pedagogical geography shaped by technology and breakthrough discoveries in linguistics, psychology, and neurobiology. My Favorite Assignment is designed to speed new teaching methods to the classroom. This article gives readers 11 teaching innovations on report writing, intercultural communication, and analysis and critical thinking debuted at the 2022 Association for Business Communication’s (ABC) 87th Annual International Conference in Tampa, Florida, USA. Additional support materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are downloadable from the ABC and DePaul University Center for Sales Leadership websites.

This article offers readers 11 classroom teaching innovations presented at the 2022 Association for Business Communication’s (ABC’s) Annual International Conference. Sessions were held online and on-site in Tampa, Florida, USA. Readers will find unique developments in teaching techniques—all designed to enhance students’ communication skill building. The new ideas featured here include personal and professional development, oral communication, analysis, and critical thinking. Additional assignment support materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on the ABC and DePaul University Center for Sales Leadership websites: https://www.businesscommunication.org/page/assignments and https://salesleadershipcenter.com/research/business-professional-communication-quarterly-my-favorite-assignment

Marginalization in decision-making discourse results in disempowerment of the marginalized and detracts from the efficacy of participatory decision making. In ESL contexts, it is usually associated with English proficiency. But this view ignores the influence of preferences for different participation styles, an understanding of which is essential for the development of effective pedagogical remedies to the problem of marginalization. The present study addresses this gap by investigating discourse participation and marginalization from a participation styles perspective. Findings reveal that marginalization resulted from a failure to adopt turn-taking strategies associated with dominant participation styles. Implications for pedagogy are discussed.

Design thinking, broadly understood as an organizational and entrepreneurial process aimed at innovative problem solving, has been productively incorporated by scholar-teachers in rhetoric, writing studies, and technical communication. Business communication offers similar opportunities. After briefly explaining design thinking and reviewing related scholarship and pedagogy, the article traces the process of creating an innovative course in business communication through each phase or mode of this recursive method: empathizing with users, defining the problem, ideating and prototyping solutions, and testing and evaluating the prototypes. The article positions course design as a project grounded in radical collaboration, with diverse colleagues as well as students.

Through the reflections of professionals occupying a variety of corporate communication roles, our aim was to understand what the corporate communication profession looks like in the current marketplace and the career pathways professionals take. We find that roles and functions are “broad and blurred” and “evolving and escalating,” while pathways and job titles are “varied and vacillating” and “tentative and time bound.” Our article offers theoretical and practical implications for industry and academic professionals looking to bridge the gap between the classroom and the marketplace. We end with pedagogical and curricular implications for corporate communication educators.

We analyze the self-rated writing skills of graduating business majors and perceptions on how much these skills changed during college. Subjective skill measures may be good proxies of objective skills, and affect outcomes such as career goals, job applications, and graduate school enrollment. The sample includes 436,370 students from 619 different institutions. On average and all else equal, business majors are estimated to be 17.6% less likely to report high writing skills at graduation when compared with other students and 11.5% less likely to report high gains in these skills during college. Average differences across disciplines are often large.

This study examines how and why 20 instructors (17 tenure-line and 3 nontenure-line) in introductory service courses enact their pedagogical values and address current concerns (e.g., personal branding, LinkedIn, and applicant tracking systems) when teaching résumés and cover letters. Research methods included a demographics survey, qualitative interviews, and critical discourse analysis of assignment sheets and deidentified student examples. Results provide an opportunity to renegotiate gaps between Business and Professional Communication’s research and pedagogical methods, shifting from overemphasizing formatting and checklists and toward understanding job applications as workplace genre ecologies to encourage deeper learning.

This study examined student perceptions of an online case study development experience where students wrote their own case studies about workplace communication processes and created accompanying pedagogical materials. Students then shared their cases in small groups and engaged in dialogue. Students from organizational communication classes at four universities completed preevaluations ( n = 77) and postevaluations ( n = 67), providing quantitative and qualitative data. Analyses suggested that students perceived that the experience enhanced their understanding of course materials, aided them in connecting course materials to the real world, and enabled them to reflect on their own and their classmates’ organizational experiences.

This article presents an observational case study of a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Resource Manager working with community members through a contested project. Using the Aristotelian concepts of ethos, credibility, and character development, I examine ethos appeals the Resource Manager used to align Corps’s sustainability values with the community’s values. Transcribed interviews with community members reveal this alignment evolved through a coconstructed ethos negotiation process between the Resource Manager and the community. The article concludes with rhetorical and pedagogical insights gained from the case study that apply to conflict resolution in organizational communication.

Business adopted a terminology of sustainability to defend, then justify, and finally explain practices that acknowledged resource limitations as inherent in the business environment. Tracing the rhetoric across a half century of business use demonstrates an expansion of the concept of sustainability to encompass managerial attention to finite human, capital, and political resources. A rhetoric of sustainability seemed to promise a revolution in management practice, and practitioners have indeed adopted principles of complex systems. The sustainability terminology retains its narrower focus on environmentally responsible corporate activities, however, and management communication pedagogy has not yet recognized the emerging discourse of adaptive communication practices.

The instructor developed an assessment tool based on Service-Learning (S-L) for developing business and professional communication (BPC) skills in business school students in India ( N = 117). The students practiced their organizational, leadership, and interpersonal communication skills in an authentic, contextual, and workplace atmosphere during this S-L assessment project. The effectiveness of the assessment tool has been studied with a posttest and then pretest. The need for an innovative and holistic BPC skills assessment tool is discussed. The article also presents implications of the project for students and pedagogy along with the challenges in using the assessment project.

This article features 12 teaching innovations presented at the 2020 Association for Business Communication (ABC) annual international conference held online due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Readers can explore the classroom methods designed to enhance students’ individual and career skills, critical thinking, teamwork, and report writing skills—many are designed to be taught online. This article is the first in a two-part series. The next article will appear in the September 2021 issue. Additional teaching materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on the ABC website: https://www.businesscommunication.org/page/assignments .