Title: Aims and scope of the course and how to navigate through it.
Course: Corporate Social Responsibility online > Section: Introduction

Hello! In this section, we want to explain the aims and scope of this course and to show how you can effectively navigate through the course.

What are the aims of the course?

We hope that after completing this course you will be able to:

Discuss the difference between the traditional model of the firm and the contemporary view of CSR.

Recognize the role of Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability in developing a businesses strategy.

Apply the knowledge and insights gathered in the field of CSR to real life problems.

What is the scope of the course?

The course consists of an introduction, four content parts, and a feedback section:

Introduction | Contains overall information on the scope, aims and content of the course.
Part 1: Business ethics and Sustainability | Where we discuss the question whether business is all about  money or there are also other important business drivers. You will get acquainted with one of the most important scholars in the CSR field, Edward R. Freeman, whose ideas laid the foundations for the contemporary development of CSR and helped to integrate the concept into business practice. Next, we will go through the approaches to ethical reasoning in business, get familiar with the concept of externalities, which help us understand why the biggest current challenge for business is related to sustainability.   /ca. 3 hours/
Part 2: Corporate Social Responsibility | Where you will learn the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility. In a nutshell, we explain the development of the concept so that you can better understand the current views on CSR. To deepen your understaning of the concept, we invite you to take part in a game where you will explore each element of the CSR concept separately: C - which stands for corporations, S - which stands for society, R - which stands for responsibility.   /ca. 2.5 hours/
Part 3: Strategic approach to CSR | The main part of the course where you first get familiar with the basics of strategy development so as to be able to apply this approach to developing a CSR strategy. You will first explore the context for CSR strategy development, and then go step by step thorugh the whole process. When you are ready with the theory, you will exercise your knowledge and develop elements of a strategy in 4 CSR areas: market development, customer relations, employee relations and supply chain management.   /ca. 6.5 hours/
Part 4: Evaluating CSR impact | The last content part, which summarizes the knowledge acquired in the previous parts in the context of impact evaluation.  You will get familiar with how firms can monitor their social, environmental and economic impact on their stakeholders by having one more look at the externalities resulting from business operation.   /ca. 3 hours/
Feedback | At the end we will also ask you to provide a feedback to the course, so that we can improve if in the future.

How to navigate through the course?

You've probably noticed that you cannot see all the contents of the course at once. This is because we don't want to immediately overload you with the content; we'd rather let you explore it while going from one section to another. Therefore, we use the "completion button" and the function of "restricted access".

You will find the "completion button" to the right of each activity.

- If the square icon is drawn with the solid line (    ), you can just click on it to mark this activity as completed.
- If the square icon is drawn with the dotted line (---), it is necessary for you to complete the activity according to the instructions (e.g. create a post in a discussion, comment on any other post, upload your assignment, or successfully complete the test).
 | Means that you will get access to a given activity only when you have completed the previous one (e.g. first you need to take part in a discussion and only then you will be granted access to the next activity).