Faculty Showcase CSULB MGMT 300
Faculty Showcase CSULB MGMT 300
Purpose: to help other instructors teaching the same course
Abstract: These open textbooks are being utilized in a Management course for undergraduate by Mark Washburn at CSU Long Beach. The open textbooks provide core content aligned with the department standard course outline. The main motivation to adopt open textbooks was cost, as our university’s introduction to management course blends general management and supply chain concepts, while most texts blend general management with organization behavior. Most student access the open textbook in Canvas through either a viewer, download, or structured quiz.
Course Title and number: Principles of Management and Operations.
MGMT 300-08 (7723)
Brief description of course highlights: Principles and theories of management, organization theory, planning and control techniques. Management of the overall organization and the production/operation systems of organizations. CSULB Catalog Description
Student population: This course is required of all business majors, including Accounting, Finance, Information Systems, Management (HRM and SCM), and Marketing. In fall 2024, COB had 5,442 undergraduate majors, including 1,366 lower-division pre-business students, and 302 minors. Although most of the students are residents of Los Angeles and Orange counties, COB attracts students from all over the state. Women account for 49% of COB's undergraduate enrollment, compared to the university's 58%. 50% of COB undergraduate students are Hispanic/Latino, while 20% are Asian, 13% are Caucasian, 4% African-American, and 6% are international students. In 2024-2025, the College produced over 1,438 B.S. graduates and 446 MBA and MS graduates.
Course prerequisites: Business majors, Pre-Business majors, International Business minors, Entrepreneurship minors, SCM minors, Asian Studies, Construction Engineering Management, and Applied Mathematics. Freshmen excluded.
Learning or student outcomes:
1. Critical Thinking: Students will demonstrate conceptual learning, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills.
a) Students will identify and analyze the role of managers in carrying out the functions of planning, organizing, leading and controlling in a business;
b) Students will examine business situations and processes and apply the tools and frameworks of operations management to solve key problems businesses face in executing their plans and strategies.
B. Ethics: Students will demonstrate awareness of ethical, social responsibility, and citizenship issues and the necessity and obligation to apply them in decision making in the local, regional, and global workplace.
a) Students will examine the ethical and social responsibility issues that exist in managerial contexts;
b) Students will identify the ethical, legal, and socially responsible choices available in those contexts.
C. (Management Specific) Business functions: Students will demonstrate understanding of all business functions, practices and related theories and be able to integrate this functional knowledge in order to address business problems.
a) Students will examine the execution of the managerial functions of planning, organizing, leading, and control in business organizations and evaluate their effectiveness in addressing business challenges;
b) Students will apply operations management tools and processes to solve business problems.
D. (Management Specific) Domestic & Global Environment: Students will be able to demonstrate knowledge of today’s domestic and global business environment (e.g., legal, regulatory, political, cultural, and economic).
a) Students will demonstrate that they understand the complexity in today’s domestic and global business environment (legal, regulatory, political, cultural and economic);
b) Students will identify legal, regulatory, political, cultural and economic factors affecting supply chains involving distributors, suppliers, and partners around the world.
Principles of Management , 2019. Bright, S.D. et. al. available on OpenStax.
Principles of Management is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of the introductory course on management. This is a traditional approach to management using the leading, planning, organizing, and controlling approach. The table of contents of this book was designed to address two main themes. What are the variables that affect how, when, where, and why managers perform their jobs? What theories and techniques are used by successful managers at a variety of organizational levels to achieve and exceed objectives effectively and efficiently throughout their careers?
Fundamentals of Operations Management , 2024, Abbas, A & Goosheh, S. available through Pressbook.
The Fundamentals of Operations Management introduces students to the essential concepts and practices in the field of operations management. It covers a wide range of topics such as strategic capacity planning, facility location, supply chain management, just-in-time and lean systems, and risk monitoring.
Operations Management , 2025 , Drane, M. and Faramarzi, H. available through Libretext.
Operations Management , 2025, Hammond, J.. available through Libretext.
This course will introduce students to the core concepts of operations management and its impact on organizational success. The course covers essential skills, from managing daily operations to planning and executing long-term projects, providing a comprehensive understanding of how businesses function efficiently.
Student access: While I will provide links to the online sources, the textbooks will also be available through Canvas and integrated into weekly quizzes to ensure that students are doing the readings.
Supplemental resources: I did find a few case analyses freely available from the open source cites along with those from a few other universities (MIT has a few excellent cases freely available). I will be using Wall Street Journal articles to ensure currency of topics.
Provide the cost savings from that of a traditional textbook. A typical Management textbook can be rented for a semester for roughly $70, purchased as hardcopy for $100, or subscribed to with adaptive learning modules (e.g. McGraw Hill Connect) for $170. The prices are roughly the same for Operations Management texts. With e-texts, the vendors are occasionally willing to create a digital custom packet that takes chapters from both books if instructors adopt the adaptive pricing.
License: To my knowledge all the textbooks listed operate under a common open-source license.
Please provide an explanation or what motivated you to use this textbook or OER/Low Cost. This process should save students money as it alleviates the need to buy multiple texts for a single course.
How did you find and select the open textbook for this course? Our campus Alternative Learning Solutions program connected me with our dedicated college librarian and an academic technology course facilitator who held workshops and individual sessions showcasing various open-sourced materials. Our librarian complied a brief list of possible resources to get me started in the review and selection process.
Sharing Best Practices: Based on my discussions with our ALS team, it may be advantageous to download the materials rather than solely providing links, as free materials can be taken down. From my experience, the free materials provide a solid basis, but require additional supplements to provide a comparable experience to the premium options.
Describe any challenges you experienced, and lessons learned. Our Academic Technology and Library services do not appear to be working directly with our campus bookstore, which is promoting a subscription model for premium textbook adoption. Most free materials require some additional supplements, for which I am using Wall Street Journal articles (through a campus subscription) along with other resources. The main challenge will be adapting the readings to Canvas quizzes, to ensure that the students actual engage with the assigned course materials.
Instructor’s Name: Mark Washburn
Please provide your title and your institution with a link to your university page. I am a Management professor at the California State University, Long Beach. I teach Principles of Management, Policy and Strategy, and International Business.
Please provide a link to your university page.
In addition to the course outlined above, I regularly teach Business Strategy and Policy (Mgmt. 425) which involves the integration and application of knowledge theories and techniques derived from the study of business disciplines. Use of the case method and business simulations to formulate business strategies and plans.
Describe your teaching philosophy and courses you teach (or taught) and any research interests related to your discipline or teaching.
I prefer active and applied methods of interacting with course materials, ideally in a flipped classroom approach. The challenge to this is to get students to engage in materials outside of the classroom so that we can minimize content presentation during our sessions together. While students have generally advanced in their ability to absorb an inundation of data, their ability to synthesize and articulate specific actions in response to the overabundance of needs development. Students tend to be masters of memorization (at least in the short term), but I have to convince them each term that I actually want to know what they think.