Marketing
180-day Principles of Marketing Course
Personal Finance
90-day Personal Finance Course
Entrepreneurship
180-day Principles of Entrepreneurship Course
Intro to Business
180-day Introduction to Business Course
Pitch Deck Series
40-day Pitch Deck Series
Principles of Finance
180-day Principles of Finance Course
Principles of Management
180-day Principles of Management Course
Econ 101
90-day Econ 101 Course
Accounting
180-day Accounting Course
Custom Course
Pull in BusinessU content and / or your own content.
Outline
Manage your class & content from one view.
Groups
Easily create & manage groups, track leader efficacy.
Create
Add & place your own content in any class.
Reports
Get actionable insights on student activity & performance.
Vault
Build multiple-choice summative exams in seconds.
Explore
Quickly search the BU content library and use pieces & parts in any class.
Integrate
Sync with your LMS for single sign-on, grade sync, & rostering.
More...
BU is packed with teacher-inspired features. Learn more about all BU can do.
Getting Started
Marketing
180-day Principles of Marketing Course
Personal Finance
90-day Personal Finance Course
Entrepreneurship
180-day Principles of Entrepreneurship Course
Intro to Business
180-day Introduction to Business Course
Pitch Deck Series
40-day Pitch Deck Series
Principles of Finance
180-day Principles of Finance Course
Principles of Management
180-day Principles of Management Course
Econ 101
90-day Econ 101 Course
Accounting
180-day Accounting Course
Custom Course
Pull in BusinessU content and / or your own content.
Outline
Manage your class & content from one view.
Groups
Easily create & manage groups, track leader efficacy.
Create
Add & place your own content in any class.
Reports
Get actionable insights on student activity & performance.
Vault
Build multiple-choice summative exams in seconds.
Explore
Quickly search the BU content library and use pieces & parts in any class.
Integrate
Sync with your LMS for single sign-on, grade sync, & rostering.
More...
BU is packed with teacher-inspired features. Learn more about all BU can do.
Getting Started
We've just released a completely redesigned editor for teachers to use when creating their own content under the My Content tab.
Create new elements using the plus button, and drag them around using the dragger that appears when you hover over them.
We hope you like it!
Teachers can now control default assignment settings for each of their assignment categories. This means now instead of setting defaults for every assignment, you can have different defaults depending on which category the assignment is created with.
For example, you can set 3 maximum attempts for Classwork and 1 attempt for Tests / Quizzes. Neat!
Teachers can now invite other teachers to their class to “team-teach” with them. The team teaching feature allows the “owner” of the class to control which teachers have access to their class, and their individual permissions as a team teacher.
To get started, go to your Class Settings and then click on Teachers & Permissions.
Class settings were getting a bit out of control, with many ways to customize your class on one page! If you click on Class Settings now, your class settings have been organized into different categories based on function.
You’ll also notice your default groups configuration is no longer on the class sidebar, and has been moved to class settings.
On assignments that allow multiple attempts, teachers are now able to view all of the student's previous attempts. To get started, when grading an assignment, select a student from the left sidebar. If multiple attempts are enabled, the student's attempts will pop in on the left sidebar.
The table is now a little more compact, providing plenty of room to see more students and grades at once.
Assignments also now include small indicators for their current sync status, and you can turn these indicators on and off by using the settings button at the top-right corner of the grades table. Even more room to see grades!
Teachers now have more control over when to reveal answers on assignments. If assignments have multiple attempts, teachers can elect to automatically reveal answers to students after a specific number of attempts.
Students are also able to elect to forfeit the rest of their attempts to see the answers early, as long as the teacher has reveal answers turned on.
Previously, whenever a student would retry an assignment, their answers were cleared. Now, whenever they retry an assignment the answers from their latest submission are restored, so they no longer have to completely redo an assignment on each attempt.
Instead of having to select the same sort option each time you go back to the grades table for a class, your previously-selected sort option is now restored.
Teachers can now automatically move students from one class to another, even if they've already done work in one class.
To move students, go to the Students page inside your class, click the three dots to the right of the student you want to move, and then click Move to another class.
For auto-graded assignment submissions, teachers can now reset the grade to the automatic grade. This is useful if there are ever any issues with the automatic grading system, or if you've customized the grade and would like to reset it back to the original grade.
If you have a saved report you've made modifications to, currently you can only save those changes back to the original saved report.
We've added a new "Save as..." button to allow you to save the changes to a new report instead.
Currently, the only way to reset assignment submissions for students is to completely clear their answers.
However, if a student simply submitted too early by accident, they would have to completely redo the assignment. Now, teachers have the option to unsubmit the assignment, or completely reset it. Unsubmitting the assignment keeps the student's answers, and completely resetting it works the same way the current reset functionality does.
Sometimes our video captions would move from one to another too quickly, so now we display the previous caption with the current caption so you don't lose your place.
We've adjusted how filters work inside the gradebook, and added the ability to sort by creation date, due date, and the last submission date (the last date a student submitted an assignment for grading).
Students and teachers can now watch BusinessU videos with English or Spanish captions. To get started, click on the Captions icon when watching videos (immediately to the left of the fullscreen option), and then select your language of choice.
This update is rolling out gradually, so you might not see translations and captions available on every video immediately.
You're already able to sync assignments with your LMS for communicating assigned materials with students and grade passback.
Now, you can do the same with regular content. Simply click on the three dots next to the content, click sync, and then select your LMS class you'd like to sync with. The content is automatically synced and students will see it in their feeds if it's enabled.
You may also click on the "Copy Link" option to copy a link to the content, if you'd like to share it directly with students.
Learn how to use this new feature in our support article.
Teachers were confused by our lesson naming convention, so we overhauled it. Topics are now numbered chronologically and lessons have an all new coding system that is based on the chronological position of the lesson. For example, the 5th lesson in the marketing course, Marketing Strategies and Marketing Mix, used to have the lesson code MKT-003X, which didn’t say much about the relative position of the lesson. Now the same lesson has the lesson code 1-5.
The “1” indicates that the lesson is part of the first topic of the marketing course and the “5” indicates that it is the 5th lesson in the first topic.
We created a new explore page that allows teachers to search for content by course, keyword search, content area, and standard! The new search experience also includes new thumbnails and filtration functionality when within a search.
The new embedded standards feature is a huge step forward in our efforts to help teachers find standards-aligned curriculum. Lessons now show which state-specific standard(s) are aligned to the content. Teachers can also filter by lessons aligned to their state standards in the explore tab.
The national standards alignment is available to all teachers and we are embedding new state standards according to teacher demand.
The reports tab is more powerful and intuitive than ever before. Teachers can analyze student performance by standard, by lesson, by metric, and they can compare performance across multiple classes/students with all new charts. Teachers can also save report presets for reports that are commonly viewed.
Hi Teachers!
After hearing from so many of you asking for bellringers, case studies, current events, and more content to help your students understand how business curriculum relates to their life... we're thrilled to announce a new resource for you: BU at the Bell!
Think SNL Weekend Update meets Bell Ringers. Each episode brings what's going on in the business world, to your classroom.
They're funny, short, and feature a diverse group of hosts who are passionate about engaging with other students who also care about the world of business.
We've included Driving Questions with each episode that you can have students answer and submit for a grade in BusinessU, or simply discuss in a class setting.
We'll send an email with a link to the new content each week. And you can click here to find the other BUATB episodes in the BusinessU platform.
We're releasing four episodes this semester, and then beginning Fall 2022, they'll be a weekly release that you can count on to shake things up in the classroom!
We've added a new setting to your class settings to allow teachers to automatically mark any incomplete (and late) work as 0% inside the gradebook, until the work is submitted.
We've released a few fixes around assignments and syncing your assignments with your LMS of choice.
On drag and drop assignments, the word bank will now stick to the top of the page, meaning no more shuffling up and down the page to complete your assignment.
If you have an ungraded assignment from a student, and then remove them from the class, the assignment will no longer show up as ungraded without any actual submissions to grade.
Finally, with our Schoology integration, the grading period will not automatically reset each time you grade an assignment. So once the assignment is created inside Schoology, feel free to tweak the grading period to your liking with confidence it won't be changed on you later.
Here you can view a quick summary of which third-parties you're currently integrated with, and if any of them require action on your behalf. If you're having issues syncing content to a third-party, we recommend refreshing your account on this page (found in Settings → Connected Accounts) first.
We made some improvements to the stability of our Canvas integration. Because of this, you'll likely need to re-authenticate with Canvas (and will be asked to do so the next time you sync content). Your district may need to enable additional scopes. If it does, you will be presented with a message that shows what scopes are missing.
In this small update, we released a few visual tweaks and a few performance improvements. Notably, Chromebook users aught to have a friendlier experience as we've tweaked a few parts of the interface to give Chromebook users a bit more space.
The grades table now loads all assignments by default, and loads in grades as you scroll. No more scrolling, waiting, scrolling, and waiting! View all of your assignments at once and quickly scroll to the assignment you're looking for.
Inside the outline view, teachers now have access to a quick summary of the current locked status, scheduled date, and sync status of a piece of content (directly to the left of the enable switch).
Teachers can now also sync assignments directly from the outline view. Just hover over a piece of content, click the three dots that appear, and then click Sync with... when it pops up.
We've just revamped the design of the video player for all video content, and added a volume control.
Additionally, teachers now have a setting inside Class Settings to configure whether or not students should be allowed to skip through videos if they haven't watched the whole video at least once. By default, students are not allowed to skip through videos until they watch it all the way through at least once.
Instead of revealing answers on every assignment individually, teachers can now set default settings at the class-level for revealing answers and excluding assignments from the gradebook. These settings apply to newly-created assignments, so no need to keep manually updating them!
Teachers, you may now connect to your Schoology accounts to:
You’ll start to notice some pieces of content now support downloading as a PDF. Simply click the “Download as PDF” button, wait a few seconds, and then download your PDF!
Teachers, you may now connect to your Canvas accounts to:
We’ve heard you! Because of your feedback, we have dramatically changed the way our grading system works. It should look a lot familiar, and feel much easier to navigate. Check it out today by going to the “Grades” tab inside a class, and click the link above to learn more about what changed and how it works.
This feature includes the following changes:
Only want to assign an assignment or reading to a specific subset of your students? No problem! Simply click on the “Enable for…” option in the settings menu for a piece of content, and select the students you want to be able to see that content.
Content enabled for only some students is shown as blue instead of the traditional green on the enable toggle. If you want to enable for more students, disable the content and then click “Enable for…” again and select some more students. If you want to disable for all students completely, simply click on the enable switch for that piece of content to disable it.
This also applies to the new gradebook! Assignments enabled for only some students will only affect their specific grades.
We now support sending direct messages to students, complete with a flexible rich-text editor and the ability to add multiple students to the same thread. Send a message to your entire class, or to one specific student.
Students also have the ability to send teachers a message individually.
Teachers have access to moderation controls. You can remove any student message, or remove a student from the thread entirely.
The new businessu.org website includes information about our 2021 course catalog, and our new BusinessU explainer video details our standards-aligned, video-based lessons and latest platform enhancements. Please be sure to share it with your fellow Teacher colleagues.
Our team has been hard at work developing all new interactive courses that bridge the business world to your classroom in a more engaging way. The 2021 course catalog includes updates to our Personal Finance, Principles of Entrepreneurship, Principles of Marketing and Intro to Business courses, and includes a new Pitch Deck series. We also announced a new Accounting I course, due in Q1 2022. For more information please browse through our 2021 fully hybrid-enabled course catalog.
Check out the new learn section, complete with our teacher tutorial series, to learn how to make the most out of BusinessU.
Finally, learn about the new features showcased in our new explainer video.
Instead of dredging through your email client in search of an old notification, you can now click on the notification icon at the top-right of the page to view all notifications that have been sent to you.
We also added controls to this popup to quickly mark all notifications as read / unread.
This is the new default view for students.
The outline view for students looks exactly the same as teachers, with the following adjustments:
Use the top navigation bar to find content, create content, or view reports.
To manage your classes, click on the Classes link at the top of the page, and you’ll be presented with your list of classes. Click on a class to view the course, manage students, and grade assignments.
Create a new group or topic by clicking Add Content from the Course Outline view, and then click either Group or Topic. This is especially important for build-your-own courses.
Once you create your new group or topic, drag it wherever you’d like using the new drag and drop functionality in the Course Outline view.
If you’d like to remove it from your class, hover over the group and click on the three dots at the right, and then click Remove from Class.
We have redesigned the custom content (or Add Content) section. You can now access the redesigned custom content section by clicking “My Content” at the top of the page.
Watch our tutorial video on how to create and manage custom content here.
This also includes much simpler interfaces for creating new sections and assignments. We hope you will find the assignment creation process familiar and easier to use.
Preview content by clicking the Preview option in the settings menu for a piece of custom content, or add it to your class by clicking Use in Class.
Teachers can now automatically copy content from one class to another. Either copy an entire class to another, or copy a specific piece of content to another (or all) of your classes.
Watch our tutorial video on how to copy content from one class to another here.
Copying an entire class’ settings to another class is the quickest way to setup different periods for the school year. Setup an entire class exactly how you like it, then go to the Class Settings page and click Copy Settings
You can also copy settings for one specific piece of content from the outline view. To do this, hover over the three dots on the right side of a piece of content, and then click on the Copy to Class options.
Use the new “Explore” tab to find extra content for your class. Browse your library of courses, or search for specific content areas or standards.
Use the search box at the top of the page if you’re looking for something very specific. Once you find something, hover over it and click on the Use in Class button.
When previewing another course, you can click on the Create Class with this Course button to immediately create a new class with that course, or you can click on the folder icon next to each group to add that entire group to your class.
BusinessU now supports Microsoft Teams for rostering and assignments. Import students from your Teams, and sync assignment grades back to the MS Teams gradebook.
We have created two tutorial videos on how to use MS Teams in your classroom:
To get started with Microsoft Teams, click on the settings gear from the Manage Classes page, and connect your Team.
You can sync assignments back to MS Teams the same way you do with Google Classroom. Go to the Settings tab when viewing the assignment in the course viewer, and click on the Sync button from that page.
You can now drag and drop any content around inside the Course Outline view, anywhere you would like.
Watch our tutorial video on how to move content inside your outline view.
Drag a piece of content into any other group you would like, or drag an entire group anywhere in the course.
We have also added two shortcuts when dragging content around:
BusinessU is much faster: We’ve gone through and reworked significant portions of the platform with performance in mind. Because of this, reports, grading, and course navigation are all now much faster.
Login with Google: Teachers & students can now login to BusinessU with their district Google accounts. Teachers will be able to use this functionality immediately, but students will not be able to login with their district accounts until their teacher associates their Student ID / Teacher ID with a Google account.
Once you login with Google, you will be prompted to allow access to Google Classroom and your basic profile information.
Google Classroom integration: Teachers can now import students directly from their Google Classroom rosters, and can configure assignments to automatically sync grades back to Google Classroom.
Students can belong to multiple classes: Currently, if one student is in multiple classes, they have to be given a separate Student ID for each class. We understand this is cumbersome, so we’ve fixed it! Teachers can now invite a Teacher ID / Student ID pair to their class, or they can invite a student via Email Address or through their Google account. Students can now use the same account through their entire tenure at your school.
Student ID / Teacher ID deprecation: We no longer recommend creating student accounts with a Student ID & Teacher ID, though we have left the feature available to support existing customers and those who prefer to use Student ID / Teacher ID instead of logging in with a Google account or email address.
Switch to student account: Every teacher is now enrolled as a student in all of their classes and can quickly switch to their student account without having to log out and back in as the student. In the top right corner, teachers are able to toggle between their student account and teacher account all while logged into the same user.
More convenient grading experience: Currently, teachers have to click through each question on a student’s submission individually. We’ve already updated the grading dialog to display all questions in the same view so teachers can tab down the page, and we have more grading enhancements on the way.
Faster video experience: We’ve revamped how videos are presented to students in our video-enabled courses. Students are presented with a new, faster video player that allows quick back / forward controls, and playback speed adjustments.
Brand new design. We’ve refined the design for the teacher and student interfaces based on feedback from teachers.
This includes a new outline view, a new course viewer, new ways to switch classes (try pressing the slash key!), and a clearer navigation structure for quick access to our top features.
Check out the list below for all the other goodies this new design includes!
Other features:
Other fixes:
New reporting interface. We released a new reporting interface, re-engineered from the ground up to make sure we’re presenting the most relevant information to teachers.
The old student reporting interface is still available underneath the “Grades & Group Performance” tab when viewing information about a student.
Other features:
Other fixes:
Classroom announcements. Teachers can now create announcements to share with students in their classes using our robust editing interface.
More flexibility when moving content. Teachers are now able to move content into different groups instead of being restricted to re-organizing inside their original groups.
Better support for build-your-own-course. We implemented better support for teachers creating their own courses from scratch. We’ll continue to make improvements to this interface.
Other features:
Other fixes:
We removed active days. The “active day” feature and the “enabled or disabled” features were too similar and accomplished relatively the same purpose, so we’ve simplified the system where each piece of content is now either on or off.
We have re-done the student dashboard. Now, students will see their classes listed across the top of the screen. Inside each class, they have access to their “To-Dos,” view the course, and use the new grades tab.
All segments are disabled by default. Instead of showing students all content up-front, we now let the teacher decide what content to show the students at all times. Whenever you start a class, the content for the first day will be enabled, but nothing else. This allows you to show more content to your students as you move throughout the semester.
Other features:
Other fixes:
Content Manager. The content manager allows you to include content from other courses included in your license into your current class, and allows you to create your own sections (something the students read) and assignments (something the students do). For more information on how to use the content manager, view our support article here.
Student progress indicators for teachers. Inside your schedule view, you can now see a circular progress bar that indicates how many of your students have looked at the content. With this feature, you can get a quick glimpse into the coverage of any piece of content.
Other features:
Other fixes:
Quiz Vault. The Quiz Vault allows you to automatically generate your own custom assignments where specified in the course. You can choose from all questions given to students throughout the semester, and filter based on whether they were covered, or are recommended.
Assignment randomization for students. Under your assignment settings, you’ll notice a new ” Randomize” checkbox. If you select that, the assignment’s questions will be given in random order to all of your students. One more tool to create a unique experience for each student and to combat cheating!
Other features:
Other fixes:
Assignment answers are saved offline. We know internet connections can be a little hit-or-miss sometimes. Now, students can rest easy knowing that if they’re having connection issues, their answers will still be saved locally on their machine. Once their internet has come back, they can submit their assignment normally.
Report Exports. We added an export button to all reports. If you want to export data to generate your own graphs or import that data into another system, you can now click the export button on every report to receive a CSV copy of it.
Other features:
Other fixes:
We’re releasing a speedier interface with this update. We changed some technologies we use under the hood in order to improve our API response time and speed up the communication between our API and your web browser,
Assignment time limits. You can now set a maximum amount of time your students can take to complete an assignment. Once they run out of time, their answers will be submitted and they won’t be able to edit them anymore. Of course, they can retry the assignment if you have multiple attempts enabled.
Other features:
Other fixes:
The course viewer sidebar now shows content broken down by day. You can still access the tree view by using the view selector at the top right of the panel. It also scrolls infinitely, so you’ll have access to all available content in one screen, without any loading times.
We now support multiple attempts on assignments. You can specify the maximum number of attempts in the same place you choose the due date. By default, all assignments are limited to 1 attempt. Multiple attempts only applies on assignments that can be auto-graded (so they are only multiple choice). When a student submits an assignment, they are presented with their grade and given an opportunity to try again if they have not exceeded the maximum number of attempts already.
Other features:
Other fixes:
Support
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