TOS Crew: Principles of Marketing from Professor in a Box

Principles of Marketing  is the second product from Professor in a Box that we’ve had the privilege of reviewing with the TOS Crew. The first was Financial Accounting (click link to read that review).


This college-level introductory course is different from many in that there’s no textbook. All the material is presented through a series of lectures with Flash slides, supplemented with real-life examples provided through Internet links, and rounded out with quizzes and tests.

Course objectives

Principles of Marketing is a college-level introductory course in marketing. High school students preparing for the CLEP test in marketing and entrepreneurs starting their own businesses (whether young or old, parents or students, homeschoolers with a family business) will likely find this course helpful.

Here’s an explanation of the course objectives from the course itself:

I like that emphasis on relevant, real-world examples, don’t you?

Well organized

The lectures are organized in a functional manner. The speaker starts by stating course objectives, then presents the material in the lesson, and finally offers a summary or wrap-up.

You can watch the lecture slides as they unfold. One thing I appreciate about this kind of format is that if I miss something, it’s easy to scroll back and repeat something. Lecture slides are also available in PDF format, so you can print out the slides and take notes on the printout.

For each lesson, there’s a one- or two-page PDF of key concepts, very helpful in reviewing for the quiz or making sure you haven’t missed something.

The lessons are all set up along the same lines: You watch the video lecture, study the key concepts PDF, investigate the Internet links related to the lesson, and take the chapter quiz.

Interactive

Three more comprehensive exams are included, spaced at intervals something like two mid-terms and a final exam. The quizzes and exams are set up to give you instant feedback; after answering a question, you submit the answer and see whether it’s correct. At the end of the test you receive your score. (Sure beats waiting for a TA (teaching assistant) to grade your test and post the results on a bulletin board a week later! You can tell it’s been awhile since I went to college — I’m sure there are more efficient ways of learning your grade these days. Principles of Marketing is one of the most efficient, though, with its instant turnaround.)
You can take a quiz or exam multiple times. If you’re interrupted in your test taking, or you want to take the test more than once, the program is sophisticated enough to resume in the middle of the test, or start a new session at your prompt.

I liked the feel of the course from the very first lesson. The lecturer is personable, easy to listen to, and she stops the lecture in the first moments to have you respond to a question, writing down your answer, and referring to it at the end of the lecture. Even though this is a “canned” slide-show, it has the flavor of  a “live” course.

Julie Pfirsch, Ph.D. is the course instructor. She does a good job of explaining the material, making it relevant to the listener. She doesn’t merely read the slides; she explains them.

Flexible scheduling

The course includes three suggested schedule options:
- Academic year: one lesson per week, taking an entire academic year (28 weeks).
- Traditional college semester format: two lessons per week for 14 weeks
- Summer school format: three lessons per week for 9 weeks

Principles of Marketing  is available from Professor in a Box for $119. At this link you can also view a sample chapter and see the list of online resources.

To read more TOS Crew opinions of Principles of Marketing, click here.


Disclaimer: TOS Crew members were provided a free copy of Principles of Marketing for our family’s personal use and review purposes. We receive no monetary compensation for offering our opinion. Opinions offered here are our own.

Gluten-free Apple Crisp (Yum!)

As I mentioned last week, I ran out of all four versions of my homemade GF flour mix. I had four containers, all slightly different recipes, one each for four different recipe sources (three cookbooks, one online site). I wrote the ingredients for each mix right on the container, for ease of refilling, and I have the ingredients in plastic bags in a couple of rodent-free/insect-resistant bins and in the freezer, but I just haven’t got around to the refilling part.

(In case you were wondering, Bob’s Red Mill is within driving distance. It’s a fair amount of time and gas, so we only go every two or three months, but we’re able to stock up on GF flours and starches from the bulk bins, which helps cut our costs.)

Anyhow, I mentioned last week that two of our adapted recipes use an easy-to-stir-up flour mix. They don’t even need xanthan or guar gum. Just three or four ingredients, and the mix is so forgiving that I don’t even measure all that carefully.

(Just so you know, GF flours and starches are a little different when it comes from measuring. You want to spoon them lightly into measuring cups, or for better accuracy, weigh them. This mix, below, that I use for crepes and apple crisp, I pretty much scoop, but it doesn’t much seem to matter.)

The other thing you need to know about apple crisp is that oatmeal is an important ingredient. Without the oatmeal, it just doesn’t taste like the apple crisp I’ve made over the years. Thus one of the things I buy from Bob’s is certified gluten-free oats.

Apple Crisp

4-6 apples, or enough to fill your casserole when cut up leaving about an inch for topping
2 TBS rice flour or starch (corn, potato, tapioca)
1/2 to 1 cup sugar (we like raw cane sugar — use more with tart apples, less with sweet apples)
1/2 to 1 tsp cinnamon (most recipes call for the smaller amount, but we like a good bite of cinnamon taste)
pinch salt
Optional: 1/2 to 1 cup raisins or dried cranberries (you can cut down or even eliminate the sugar in the apple filling if you choose to do this)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease casserole dish or spray with baking spray.
Wash apples. Core, peel (if not organic) and cut up into chunks. Mix flour or starch with sugar and cinnamon and toss with apples until apples are coated with mixture.

1 cup GF flour mix
1 cup certified GF rolled oats
1 cup sugar (again, you can use less if you like — I’ve cut this by as much as a half)
1/2 to 1 tsp cinnamon (see note about cinnamon, above)
pinch salt
1/2 to 1 cup butter or coconut oil

Mix dry ingredients. Cut in fat with pastry blender, two table knives, or a fork. (A pastry blender makes this a quick process.) You should end up with a crumbly mixture. Spread on top of casserole. Bake at 350F for about an hour, or until bubbly and apples are tender when pierced.

Best served warm, but pretty good when cold, too. We can do dairy, so we like to pour cream over the top of hot apple crisp, or top with whipped cream, or serve with ice cream.

Quick GF Flour Mix

My quickly cobbled-together flour mix, that works well for crepes as well as apple crisp, contains approximately:

1/2 cup rice flour (white or brown seem to work about the same)
1/4 cup tapioca or corn starch
1/4 cup sorghum flour or millet flour

Final words

With apples in season and the weather turning colder, this is the perfect recipe for breakfast, or afternoon teatime, or dessert. It fills the house with an amazing apple-cinnamon smell while baking, and it’s a great waker-upper to get our girls out of bed on a dark, dreary, rainy morning when otherwise they’d be tempted to turn over and go back to sleep.

TOS Crew: Scruble Cube

The Scruble Cube is simply amazing. Think Rubik’s Cube crossed with Scrabble or Boggle and you have an inkling of this toy/game.

What is it? Well, it’s a word game, but there’s so much more to it than that. It’s a word game for active learners, for one thing. It’s a word game that can as easily work as a game of solitaire as with a number of players. You can use the included rules, download educational activities to use with the Scruble Cube,  or make up rules of your own (which we often find ourselves doing).

The cube has six faces (as cubes do), with sixteen letters per face. You can rotate the letters the same way you’d manipulate a Rubik’s Cube to come up with a seemingly infinite combination of letters.

(The thing is just about impossible to leave alone. Just now, in the middle of the previous paragraph, I couldn’t resist picking up the cube. My eyes caught A-L-G in a row, and my brain said, “Hey! Why don’t we try to make the word algae?” Since the Cube was sitting right there in front of me, it was awfully hard to say No to my brain… I’m not quite sure how it happened, but a few twists later I had A-L-G-A-E on two faces, for a point score total of 10 points. Wait a minute! I just looked at the space before the “A” and I have a 2x word score, which makes the word worth 20 points, plus a three-face bonus of 10 points, for a grand total of 30!!! Woohoo, I’m on my way! Anybody want to join in and play?)

Fun, educational, easy to pick up

So you see, this game is hard to resist. Even Youngest, who struggles with spelling and usually avoids word games, goes for this one, with its built-in manipulative feel. The Scruble Cube fits nicely between your two hands, easy to rotate this way or that. New words form at a twist of the wrist, and if you can spell any three-letter word, you can play.

The game comes with a scorepad and sand timer. The point is to come up with the biggest word you can, or biggest number of points (since you might be able to make more than one word crossword-style), in your turn.

Our girls immediately took it out of the box the day it arrived, and I don’t think it’s had an idle day since. The Cube has gone everywhere with us; to church, to lessons, to waiting rooms, even been played in the car, and the only reason it’s on the desk in front of me right now is because I kidnapped it from a previous possessor.

How to get one of your own

The Scruble Cube is available here for $24.95. You can also get a set of replacement labels for $4.95.

Award winning fun!


Not surprisingly, this toy has won awards for its creativity, ease of use, and just plain fun!


Hey…


Christmas is coming up. Not to mention birthdays, other holidays. Mother’s Day? Father’s Day? The Scruble Cube really is the kind of gift you could give to an adult or a child. It can sit on the desk as a paperweight, on call at any time to relieve stress or provide a mental break from concentrated work. Or just let it sit in out in the open, on a table or shelf.

I don’t think you’ll ever have to dust it at all.

Read more TOS Crew reviews of this product here.

Disclaimer: Our family was given a free Scruble Cube for review purposes.  No other compensation was involved.

Movie review: Courageous

This will be fairly brief, as I ought to have written this review a week ago, right after seeing the movie. However, I still remember enough to give it an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

The theme of the movie is fatherhood. Five fathers, four of them policemen, one an accidental acquaintance who becomes part of a brotherhood of fathers. All swear together to be deliberate in their relationships with their children, setting high standards, being the best fathers they can, with God's help.

Of course, things didn't start out that way. At the beginning of the movie, the main character is... well, he's like a lot of us. He's busy with his job. He takes his family for granted. They're always there. They always will be, won't they? It's painful to watch, but it sets the stage for the change to come.

A tragedy happens to open this father's eyes, and he almost drowns in the pain that follows. Then out of the ashes (to mix a metaphor) arises a new determination, a focus, a goal. He asks his friends to keep him accountable, and they are moved to make the same resolve: to be real fathers to their children.

We have a range of families here. There's the intact family with mother and workaholic father. There's the divorced father who sees his child on weekends. There's the intact family with a father struggling to find work, to provide. There's the man who fathered a child and abandoned the mother.

This is no neat-and-tidy gospel presentation, although the Gospel is there. The people who made this movie show that it takes hard work to live life abundantly, as the Bible would have us live.

The makers of Courageous grow in skill and movie-making maturity with each movie. The seeds of greatness were there in their first movie, Flywheel (which we felt impelled to revisit today), visibly growing in Facing the Giants and Fireproof. There are familiar faces in each movie, not surprising, as one church is behind these efforts. There's the same mix of tears and laughter, a deftness in the timing, realistic (and often dramatic or comedic or both mixed together somehow) dialog.

We were reduced to tears several times during the movie, often bursting out in laughter bare moments after a moving scene through the skill of the scriptwriter and the actors. At the end of the movie, the audience burst into spontaneous applause.

If you want to be moved, if you want to be inspired, if you want to be challenged in your parenting, you've got to see this movie.

Yikes!

It seems I'm following my own blog. Don't worry, I'm not a raging egomaniac. I'm just trying to figure all this stuff out...

What fun!

It's a grand adventure. Into the unknown...

TGIF (and an online music playground)

I've got to admit, I'm glad it's Friday. I'm tired. As a matter of fact, I started to type TIGF. Now what would that mean?

Just finished writing a review of a music education enrichment program, Quaver's Marvelous World of Music. Look for it to be published in the next issue of Eclectic Homeschool Online, along with an article about one of the co-creators.

At the Quaver link above, you'll find information about the music education DVDs, but you'll also find a website with free, music-related activities. There are arcade games (which we've spent a lot of time mastering, I'm sure you wanted to know), but there are also neat compositional tools all ready for exploring and creating music. Check it out!

Under construction!

I'll be copying blog posts over to this blog as time allows. In the meantime...

To find previous Home Sweet Home(school) posts, please click on the link.