Secondary school business education teachers often approach AES feeling overwhelmed by the many module choices and curriculum hours available in Business&ITCenter21.
Though the content within our business education curriculum is quite comprehensive, sometimes too many options can be just as troublesome as too few, and you may find yourself scrambling to find your bearings, unsure of the best choices for your class.
After all, depending on the kind of business education class you teach--and whether you teach high school or middle school--there are optimal modules you can choose to lay the groundwork for your business education curriculum. Knowing these best fits for your class will save you a lot of time and trouble.
In this article, you’ll discover what business courses are most appropriate to teach with Business&ITCenter21. The courses will be divided into two general categories:
- What types of courses can AES be the core curriculum for?
- What types of courses can AES be a supplemental resource for?
By the end of this article, you’ll have a better sense of the kinds of business courses Business&ITCenter21 is equipped to teach, and how it can be used to teach them.
But before we get to that, let’s answer an important question you’re probably thinking.
Why Can Business&ITCenter21 Be Used as a Core Curriculum for Some Courses and Not Others?
Business&ITCenter21 has well-rounded and in-depth content you can use to teach many business classes, but it was not designed to be used as the core curriculum for every business-related course.
For some courses, Business&ITCenter21 can serve better as a supplemental resource to reinforce your existing curriculum.
This is because Business&ITCenter21 was developed based on National Business Education Association (NBEA) standards, which serve as a baseline for teaching comprehensive foundational business courses.
In other words, Business&ITCenter21 was designed to serve as a strong core curriculum you can use to teach foundational or introductory business courses.
For courses where you’re introducing students to business or computer concepts, Business&ITCenter21 will cover all your bases and ensure you teach your students the essentials.
These courses are generally taught by middle school or early high school business teachers, and Business&ITCenter21 could cover 18 to 36 weeks of it.
On the other hand, for more elective or advanced business classes that cover specific aspects of business with more depth, Business&ITCenter21 might serve you better as a supplemental resource.
These courses typically help students develop particular skills or explore specific facets of business--like marketing or accounting--and are generally taught more frequently in high school. Business&ITCenter21 could be used to cover 2-3 weeks of such a course, depending on the topic.
What Types Of Courses Can AES Be the Core Curriculum For?
As stated above, there are some courses that Business&ITCenter21 can be used as the core curriculum for.
This means that if you teach these courses using Business&ITCenter21, chances are you won’t need any additional resources to help you along the way. This is especially the case if you use each phase of our Four Phase framework, which is specifically designed to increase student learning and retention.
Our blended learning curriculum will stand entirely on its own in providing you the material you need for the following courses:
- Introduction to Business Courses
- Business and Technology Courses
Below you'll find recommendations on the modules teachers most often use when teaching each course with Business&ITCenter21.
Introduction to Business Courses
Alternatively called Principles of Business or Foundations of Business, this introductory course is generally taught in middle school or early high school, and is focused on establishing essential business concepts for students.
Business&ITCenter21 serves as an excellent core curriculum for intro to business classes. This is because most intro to business courses nationwide base their standards on the NBEA standards, the same standards Business&ITCenter21 was developed to meet.
In other words, Business&ITCenter21 was explicitly designed to meet the standards of most introductory business classes across the country. It has hundreds of hours of content capable of covering about 36 weeks of classes.
With that in mind, some curriculum modules instructors often use to teach intro to business classes are:
- Professionalism
- Customer Service
- Management
- Marketing
- Marketing Project
- Business Law
- International Business
- Banking and Finance
- Accounting
- Entrepreneurship
- Personal Financial Literacy
- Economics
- Job Seeking Skills
These modules do an excellent job of providing the foundation your students need to understand business concepts. However, for teachers who want to focus more closely on career readiness when it comes to their intro to business course, modules like Career Development and Business Communication are excellent starting points to use to customize your class and get your students thinking.
Need a guide on teaching foundational business courses with Business&ITCenter21? Check out this article: How to Teach Intro to Business with AES
Business and Technology Courses
Also called Computer Applications and Business, Digital Information Technology, Technology Applications, or ICT, this course generally focuses on teaching students an even combination of business concepts and computer applications, and the relationships between the two.
These courses are usually taught in middle school or early high school, and generally have an introductory bent. This makes Business&ITCenter21 a perfect fit for covering your business and computer applications needs.
Because Business&ITCenter21 specializes in introductory business and computer education, it is a natural core curriculum for this type of course, providing 180+ hours of content to cover about 36 weeks of class time.
Some curriculum modules instructors often use to teach business and technology courses include:
- Business Communication
- Career Development
- Coding Fundamentals
- Computing Systems
- Digital Citizenship
- Email and Electronic Calendars
- Getting Started with Google Applications
- Keyboarding
- Living Online - Social Communication
- Microsoft Excel Skills
- Professionalism
- Web Research
Want guidance on implementing AES your course? Read this pacing guide for a week-by-week teaching sequence: Intro to Business and Technology Pacing Guide
If you teach a technology course, you also know how important it is to teach major digital applications like Microsoft Office or Google Apps. When teaching these hands-on computer skills, the Microsoft Office and Google Apps modules are great picks that instructors often use in their classrooms.
Not sure which digital application would be best to teach for your technology class? Check out our article: Should You Teach Microsoft Office or Google Apps? 4 Things to Consider
What Types Of Courses Can AES Be a Supplemental Resource For?
For more advanced, specialized business or computer classes--often taught in upper high school--Business&ITCenter21 better serves as a supplemental resource.
This means that it likely won’t have enough material to support your entire class, but would work well to bolster a curriculum you already have. It may do this by providing lesson plans or activities robust enough to cover a few weeks’ worth of classes, but not an entire semester.
Our digital curriculum would work well to reinforce the following courses, but the material it provides wouldn’t be sufficient to carry the entire course by itself:
- Accounting Courses
- Entrepreneurship Courses
- Finance Courses
- Marketing Courses
- Business Management Courses
Below you'll find recommended modules that can help supplement each type of course.
Accounting Courses
Advanced accounting courses teach the ins and outs of what it means to be an accountant, focusing on skills involving analysis, computation, technology, and business communication.
Business&ITCenter21 covers some of the basics of accounting, but its accounting-focused material is not robust enough to cover an entire semester.
However, high school teachers often pull from the following modules in Business&ITCenter21 to reinforce their accounting curriculum:
- Accounting
- Banking and Finance
- Business Communication
- Critical Thinking
- Economics
These modules total about 43.5 hours of content, which means you have a lot of flexibility when it comes to choosing those bits and pieces of content that will best fit with your other accounting course material.
Entrepreneurship Courses
Upper-level entrepreneurship courses teach students how to recognize business opportunities and combine important finance, marketing, and management skills to successfully establish and operate businesses.
Business&ITCenter21 has an Entrepreneurship module, but it has only about 8 hours of content, so instructors teaching a class on entrepreneurship will need to already have an established curriculum.
To reinforce their entrepreneurship curriculum with Business&ITCenter21, teachers could draw from the following modules:
- Banking and Finance
- Business Communication
- Business Law
- Entrepreneurship
- Management
- Marketing
- Professionalism
These modules have a combined 54.5 curriculum hours, which provides you plenty of choices when choosing the lessons, activities, and projects that will best fit within your entrepreneurship curriculum.
Finance Courses
Advanced finance courses might cover both personal finance and business finance, dealing with concepts like taxes, income, banking, saving, investing, economics, and more. Generally, finance courses teach students hard skills when it comes to handling their money.
Business&ITCenter21 has a module dedicated to personal finance as well as one focused on finance as an industry, but even between the two of them, they cover only about 20 hours of class time total, and you likely wouldn’t use both for the same class.
However, if you want to use some material from AES to bolster either a personal finance class or a business finance class, the following modules could provide activities and lessons:
- Accounting
- Banking and Finance
- Economics
- International Business
- Marketing
- Personal Financial Literacy
Combined, these modules cover about 35 hours of content, enough to cover a few weeks over the course of a semester.
Marketing Courses
Specialized marketing courses will likely be taught in high school, covering important topics about the creative skills, ethical questions, and rapid technological changes involved with marketing in modern businesses.
Business&ITCenter21 has a dedicated Marketing module as well as a hands-on Project module students can complete to gain practical marketing skills. These cover 21 hours between them, enough for a solid unit within a greater marketing course.
Some Business&ITCenter21 modules you could draw from to reinforce your marketing course include:
- Business Communication
- Critical Thinking
- Economics
- Marketing
- Marketing Project
- Public Speaking
These modules contain around 45 hours of content between them, but are not optimized to teach a focused marketing course, so you would likely only draw upon a few of these hours here and there for use in your classroom.
Business Management Courses
High-level business management courses can sometimes be taught in high school, and help students develop valuable skills in leadership, planning, organization, problem-solving, and reaching business goals.
Business&ITCenter21 has a Management module with about 8 hours of curriculum content, which by itself could only cover a small part of a longer class focused on teaching management skills.
Some modules teachers could draw from to teach a semester-long business management course include:
- Business Communication
- Entrepreneurship
- Management
- Professionalism
- Public Speaking
- Written Communication
Between them, these modules cover about 39 hours of content, which might be enough for a few weeks of lessons and activities within a greater management curriculum.
So Where Do I Begin with Business&ITCenter21?
With all the options available in Business&ITCenter21, it can be tough to gain your bearings. There’s hundreds of hours of content on the curriculum, but that can actually work against you if you need a quick guide to help you navigate the available courses and find the best fits for you.
In this article, you’ve learned a bit about what courses Business&ITCenter21 is designed to teach:
For foundational business and computer courses, Business&ITCenter21 is a great fit that can stand on its own as your core curriculum.
When it comes to advanced or specialized business courses, however, our curriculum serves better as a supplement to reinforce material that you already have.
But even in this article we only touched upon the broad strokes of what it means to teach a business course with Business&ITCenter21.
If you want to save time, confusion, and gain clear-cut guidance on the ins and outs of our curriculum and course framework, check out our Business Fundamentals Course Guide.
This course guide provides important information for any teachers looking to teach an intro to business course, including descriptions for each module, the total hours they take to complete, and how each fits into the Four Phases.
