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Introduction to Business

15 instructional weeks + finals week (Week 1–Week 16) Free sample edition

Built with The Course Maker · samples.thecoursemaker.com

This is a complete course: fifteen instructional weeks and a finals week, every student component, built with The Course Maker and ready to import. Weeks are relative (Week 1 to Week 16); you set the dates when you import it. Browse the whole thing below. Click any piece to read it in full, then click back to return here.

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Free sample edition. No instructor, institution, or term identity appears anywhere in this edition, by design. The syllabus carries fill-in slots (instructor name, contact, office hours, institution policies) for the adopting instructor to make it their own. (Original objectives written from the standard Introduction to Business body of knowledge; not copied from any school's course outline.)
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This course is free, complete, and evergreen, and it is yours to keep; free downloads run through June 30, 2028. Students pay $0 for course materials: the readings and videos are links to freely available resources.

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Included in every course

  • ChapterRequired

    Required in every course. Every module presents the same content in three ways — a chapter to read, a slide deck with speaker notes, and captioned videos — so each student can choose how to take it in. The course is designed to reflect UDL's multiple means of representation, and the alignment report describes this to your curriculum committee.

  • Slide deck with speaker notesRequired

    Required in every course. Every module presents the same content in three ways — a slide deck with speaker notes, a chapter to read, and captioned videos — so each student can choose how to take it in. The course is designed to reflect UDL's multiple means of representation, and the alignment report describes this to your curriculum committee.

  • Captioned video linksRequired

    Required in every course. Every module presents the same content in three ways — captioned videos, a chapter to read, and a slide deck with speaker notes — so each student can choose how to take it in. The course is designed to reflect UDL's multiple means of representation, and the alignment report describes this to your curriculum committee. We link videos only when a caption track exists (from the creator or generated automatically), and we never host them.

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The syllabus

Policies, schedule, and grading

Read the full course syllabusPolicies, the week-by-week schedule, grading, and the bring-your-own-AI rules, with fill-in slots for the adopting instructor.→
Weighted gradebook

Assignment groups & weights

Configured in the export — the gradebook is set the moment the course is imported.

Assignment groupWeightNotes
Tutorials & Practice10%
Quizzes10%
Workshops20%
Assignments25%
Discussions15%
Exams20%
Total100%Letter Standard
Objectives & outcomes

What students will be able to do

Objective 1

Describe what a business is — profit, risk, and the not-for-profit contrast — its stakeholders, the factors of production, and the forces in its external environment, and explain how economic systems, supply and demand, market structures, and the economy's health indicators shape business decisions.

Objective 2

Explain how entrepreneurs turn an idea into a funded small business — a business-plan outline in the SBA's traditional format, an industry analysis with the five competitive forces, and a start-up funding plan — and compare the forms of business ownership, franchising, and mergers for that venture.

Objective 3

Evaluate business conduct with ethical reasoning and the corporate-social-responsibility frameworks, presenting the shareholder and stakeholder positions with their reasons and without a verdict, and distinguishing what is ethical from what is legal.

Objective 4

Analyze how a firm creates value through operations, quality management, and information systems, and through marketing — target markets, the marketing mix, the product life cycle, pricing and break-even, distribution, and promotion.

Objective 5

Apply the core organizational-structure concepts — the organization chart, line and staff, span of control, centralization, and tall vs. flat — and the four functions of management, the types of planning, the leadership styles, and the managerial skills to an organization at two sizes.

Objective 6

Explain how organizations recruit, select, develop, pay, and motivate people — including labor relations, the major federal employment statutes, and the classic and contemporary motivation theories in their order of publication — and diagnose a workplace situation with them.

Objective 7

Read a balance sheet, an income statement, and a statement of cash flows and compute the basic ratios; explain money, banks, deposit insurance, and the Federal Reserve; and compare debt and equity financing and the securities markets for a growth decision.

Objective 8

Explain why nations trade and how firms enter global markets — absolute and comparative advantage computed from an opportunity-cost table, the barriers to trade, the trade institutions and blocs, and the entry ladder from exporting to direct investment — with contested trade-policy questions presented as positions, and connect the course's skills to business careers.

SLO A

Business analysis — analyze a business situation with the course's tools (a SWOT, a stakeholder map, an ownership-form comparison, an organization chart, a marketing mix, a break-even, a set of financial statements and ratios), compute what the case calls for, and state the result in plain words.

SLO B

Business reasoning and integrity — make and defend a recommendation that weighs at least one stakeholder and the counter-case, separates fact from judgment, sources every real figure, and verifies AI output before relying on it.

How this course is built — read this first

Every teaching module carries the same set, in the order a student meets it: a Start Here overview, the chapter (the primary reading), the lecture (titled “Lecture: <module title>”), the slide deck with speaker notes, readings & resources (links only), the lecture tutorial and practice exercises worked with an AI tutor, the quiz, the discussion and the assignment, and the weekly Business Case Workshop. Exams: the midterm in Week 8 and the final in Week 16, a finals week with no module.

The discussion and the assignment each ship in both formats: the adaptive version is the published, graded item, and its traditional alternative (no AI) is a separate item that ships unpublished beside it. An instructor who prefers the traditional format publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one.

What you see here is every student page. The instructor pack (answer keys and worked solutions, rubric calibration, image prompts, audio-brief scripts, and the alignment report) ships only in the download, never on this site.

Adaptive and traditional

Discussions & assignments: both formats in every module

Same learning objective either way; what changes is how the work happens.

Adaptive · published

Work it through with an approved chatbot

The student does the work in a guided conversation with an approved chatbot, using a copy-paste prompt the course provides. For a discussion, the AI is a Socratic partner that challenges their thinking and never writes the post. For an assignment, the AI is a coach: it asks questions, checks the reasoning shown, and waits for the student to revise. The student submits the chat link with the required summary or report.

Traditional alternative (no AI) · unpublished

The familiar way, one click away

The student does the work themselves and submits it, and the instructor grades it against the rubric. No AI required. It ships unpublished, opening with a one-line note to the instructor; publish it instead of the adaptive version if you prefer.

All 16 weeks

Every week, every component

Each week is a heading; every component under it links to the full student page. Week 8 is a teaching module that also carries the midterm bundle; Week 16 is the finals week, with the final exam bundle and no module.

01
Week 1

The Idea and Its Environment

what a business is: an organization that sells goods or services aiming to take in more than it spends, with profit as revenue minus expenses and risk as the chance of a loss; the not-for-profit contrast (a community food bank)stakeholders named and mapped: owners, employees, customers, suppliers, lenders, the community, and governmentthe four factors of production (natural resources, labor, capital, entrepreneurship), with the note that some courses add a fifththe external environment scanned with a PESTEL checklist — political, economic, social, technological, environmental, legal — with competitors and the global setting alongsidethe running venture introduced as an idea: a mobile coffee cart's concept and its first SWOT, strengths and weaknesses inside, opportunities and threats outside
02
Week 2

The Market It Sells Into: Economics for Business

economic systems as positions with their reasons: market economies, command economies, socialism, and the mixed economies most countries runsupply and demand on one illustrative farmers'-market schedule: the amount buyers want and the amount sellers offer at each price, equilibrium at 5 dollars and 400 pints, a shortage and a surplus, and one demand shiftthe four market structures: perfect competition, monopolistic competition, oligopoly, and monopoly, with the running venture placed in monopolistic competition and the Sherman Act (1890) namedthe economy's health indicators named — growth (GDP), employment, and price stability — and fiscal vs. monetary policy named with who wields each
03
Week 3

From Idea to Plan: Entrepreneurship, Small Business & the Business Plan

entrepreneurs and their common tendencies, taught as tendencies rather than a checklist, and small business's share of all U.S. businesses from the SBA Office of Advocacy, year-stampedthe SBA's two plan formats — the traditional plan and the lean startup plan — and the running venture's plan outline in the traditional formatthe plan's market analysis with Porter (1979) and the five competitive forces applied to the cart's industrystart-up costs and the funding plan: the cart's 30,000-dollar start-up list funded by 20,000 dollars of owner money and a 10,000-dollar equipment loan; the plan summarized in three sentences
04
Week 4

Choosing a Legal Form: Ownership, Franchising & Mergers

sole proprietorship, partnership, and corporation: who owns, who is liable, how the business ends, and how it raises moneythe limited liability company and the other specialized forms the IRS names, with tax treatment taught as general education, never advicefranchising as the alternative to starting from scratch: what the franchisor supplies, what the franchisee buys, and the FTC's disclosure documentmergers and acquisitions named by type; the running venture's ownership-form comparison and choice, decided by who is liable for the equipment loan
05
Week 5

What the Business Owes: Ethics & Social Responsibility

ethics vs. legality: what is legal is not always ethical, and the reverse; a short set of ethical-reasoning questionshow organizations shape conduct: codes of ethics, ethics training, leadership by example, and protected reportingthe pyramid of corporate social responsibility (Carroll, 1991) and the triple bottom line (Elkington) as frameworksthe shareholder position (Friedman, 1970) and the stakeholder position (Freeman, 1984) presented with their reasons and no verdict, applied to an illustrative automation decision at an appliance-parts plant
06
Week 6

Making the Product: Operations, Quality & Information Systems

operations management for goods and services; the production process, location, and resource planning (inventory, suppliers, scheduling with a Gantt chart)the running venture's process map and capacity: a two-minute drink-preparation bottleneck that caps output at 30 drinks an hour, and what a second machine changesquality: total quality management, Six Sigma (3.4 defects per million opportunities), lean production, just-in-time inventory, and the ISO 9000 standards namedinformation systems and cybersecurity for a small business: the data a firm keeps, the common threats, and the basic protections — phishing awareness, strong passwords, multifactor sign-in, updates, and backups
07
Week 7

Who Buys and at What Price: Marketing, Products & Pricing

the marketing concept, target markets and segmentation, and buyer behaviorthe marketing mix as the four Ps — product, price, place, promotion (McCarthy, 1960) — and the running venture's mix; the product life cycle (introduction, growth, maturity, decline) and products vs. servicesfixed vs. variable costs and break-even units = fixed costs ÷ (price − variable cost per unit) on the cart's 36,000 dollars, 5-dollar price, and 2-dollar costmarkup vs. margin; skimming vs. penetration pricing and what a 4-dollar price does to break-even
08
Week 8 Midterm

Midterm Review & the Growth Question

cumulative review of Weeks 1 to 7 organized by the one tool or one distinction each topic asks for: revenue vs. profit, strengths vs. opportunities, equilibrium, the plan and the five forces, the forms' liability, ethics vs. legality, the bottleneck, break-even and markup vs. marginlight new material on organizational structure, posed as the growth question of one cart becoming two: the organization chart, line vs. staff, span of control, centralization vs. decentralization, and tall vs. flat, drawn for the running venture at two sizesthe midterm exam

The midterm exam bundle

09
Week 9

Reaching More Customers: Distribution, Promotion & Digital Commerce

distribution: channels, intermediaries, wholesaling and retailing, and supply-chain management; place as more than a store's locationthe promotional mix — advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, public relations, and direct and digital marketing — coordinated as integrated marketing communicationsthe running venture's promotion budget: 3,000 dollars, 4 percent of planned first-year revenue, and a punch-card sales promotion read as a costdigital commerce trends and the claims a promotion may and may not make
10
Week 10

Leading the Work: Management & Leadership

the four functions of management — planning, organizing, leading, controlling — applied to the growing venturethe types of planning: strategic, tactical, operational, and contingency; mission statements and objectivesleadership styles (autocratic, participative, free-rein) and management vs. leadershipthe managerial skills (technical, human, conceptual) and how their mix shifts with level
11
Week 11

Hiring and the Law: Human Resources & Labor Relations

human resource planning, recruitment vs. selection, training and development, performance evaluation, and pay and benefits; the running venture's hiring planlabor relations: why workers organize, collective bargaining, and grievances; union membership in 1983 and 2025 from the BLS, year-stampedthe federal employment statutes by name and year — the National Labor Relations Act (1935), the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938), the Taft-Hartley Act (1947), the Equal Pay Act (1963), Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (1967), the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) — as general education, never advicecontested terrain as positions with their reasons: unions, right-to-work laws, and the minimum wage
12
Week 12

Keeping People Engaged: Motivation

the classic theories in order of publication: Taylor (1911), the Hawthorne studies (from 1924), Maslow (1943), Herzberg (1959), McGregor (1960)the contemporary theories: equity (Adams, 1963), expectancy (Vroom, 1964), goal-setting (Locke, 1968), and Ouchi's Theory Z (1981)from theory to application: job design (enlargement, enrichment, rotation), work-scheduling options, recognition and empowermenta motivation diagnosis of the running venture's helper: hygiene factors vs. motivators, and a manager's Theory X vs. Theory Y assumptions
13
Week 13

Keeping Score: Accounting & Financial Statements

what accounting is for and who uses it; the accounting cycle's steps in plain words: record, classify, summarize, report, analyzethe accounting equation, assets = liabilities + owners' equity, on the running venture's start-up and year-end balance sheetsthe income statement for the year and the statement of cash flows by section: the cart's 9,000-dollar net income and its 2,000-dollar rise in cashratio analysis from named lines: the current ratio, debt-to-equity, gross margin, and net profit margin
14
Week 14

Paying for Growth: Money, Banking & Financial Management

money's three jobs and the traits that let it do them; banks and other financial institutions; the Federal Reserve (1913), its structure, its goals, and its tools named in wordsdeposit insurance from the FDIC (1933): 250,000 dollars per depositor, per insured bank, for each account ownership category, and what it does not coverfinancial management: debt vs. equity, stocks vs. bonds, the primary and secondary securities markets, the Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934 and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002)the running venture's financing choice for a second cart, read from its year-one statements: borrow at 8 percent or sell a 25 percent share, with no verdict
15
Week 15

Growing Beyond Borders: Global Business & the Course Synthesis

why nations trade; absolute vs. comparative advantage computed from an illustrative two-island opportunity-cost tablebarriers to trade (tariffs, quotas, embargoes, exchange controls) and who pays a tariff at the border, with how the cost is shared taught as an open empirical question; the trade institutions and blocs named, and the U.S. trade balance read from a year-stamped BEA figurethe entry ladder from exporting through licensing, franchising, contract manufacturing, and joint ventures to direct investment, starting from the cart's bottled cold brewthe course synthesis: the venture's whole life retold, the course's skills named as transferable, and the Occupational Outlook Handbook as the place to research a business career
16
Week 16 · finals week Final

Finals week

No module this week: the final exam bundle