This paper describes a negotiation task designed to introduce negotiation concepts to business students experientially in a manner that also has real consequences for the students. Students negotiate for a variety of actual items that they can take home or use in other ways. Furthermore, the task, previously done only in face-to-face classes, was recently reorganized to include both in person and remotely attending students. Both in person and remote students participate in the process and debriefing, and typically report that they enjoyed the exercise and felt engaged. This activity helps answer the need to provide complex and messy experiences during synchronous instruction that can help achieve the same gains typically provided by experiential learning within the in person classroom.
This article presents part of a five-year participatory Action Research project at a UK university, addressing curriculum re-design and development by evaluating the views of key participants: support and specialist tutors as well as students. Three main themes addressed are: student performance; interaction between international and domestic students; and academic engagement. Juxtaposition of interview comments, from tutors and international students, highlights the validity of differing views from each stakeholder group. Findings confirm the benefits of integrating academic and language support into the formal curriculum, higher levels of student engagement when embedding a large-scale business simulation, and the effectiveness of experiential learning pedagogies in mixed-nationality classrooms.
In this article we present an Action Research project which attempted to address the significant performance gap between domestic and international students on an undergraduate Business Management course at a UK university business school. In designing a final year strategy module around a business simulation, we provided international students with opportunities for active engagement through collaborative tasks, which we hoped would lead to enhanced performance and deeper engagement with teamwork, leadership and negotiation skills when studying in mixed-nationality cohorts. Recent figures from Universities UK International (2017) indicate that the UK receives almost half a million international students each year, with about 30% of these doing some form of Business and Administrative Studies. China is by far the largest country of origin, followed by Malaysia, USA, India and Nigeria. Within the Business Management subjects, international students make up about 27% of the total at undergraduate level and 63% on postgraduate taught courses. As many of the international students are on ‘top-up’ courses, the proportion of international students in a final year BM programme can be considerably higher.
Supplemental Instruction (SI) programs have been used in college and university programs since their inception in the 1970’s. The programs are viewed as a cost-effective method of delivering peer-assisted instruction to students in courses deemed difficult by virtue of the fact that they suffer from high failure and drop rates. There have been many analyses that attempt to determine the efficacy of these programs in improving student involvement and grades in the courses and in reducing drop rates and retention. Virtually every analysis has arrived at the conclusion that the SI program is successful in these endeavors. A state school is involved in the transformation of many lower-division classes to a blended learning format in an effort to increase efficiency for the use of teaching staff and classroom space. In the view of the authors, the use of SI programs using student leaders takes on added importance. The paper performs an analysis concerning the results for an introductory business statistics class. The results indicate that SI sessions had a large positive effect on student grades in the class, and the effect of SI sessions is larger than either time spent on homework assignments or participation in lecture activities. For every SI session attended a student’s grade improves by 0.73 points on a 100 point scale. The paper concludes by indicating additional data requirements that could help future research clarify the effects of SI on different demographic groups.
Based on their own experiences, students often have an incomplete knowledge of the human resource management (HRM) process. Moreover, they may feel overwhelmed by all the terminology of HRM if it is presented in a piece meal fashion. This article describes a process for helping students understand the ‘big picture’ of HRM in an inductive fashion. Based on a series of debriefing questions in relation to a short case study, Roger’s Tire Experts, instructors help students create an HRM map, a diagram of the areas and functions of HRM and how they are interrelated. Rather than ‘explaining’ the HRM process, instructors pull the required knowledge from the students themselves. Thus, students view the map as their creation and see how it is connected to a ‘real’ organization (Roger’s Tire Experts). This map, accompanied by a discussion of the need for effective HRM in organizations, provides students with a quick and creative introduction to HRM.
This paper discusses how one business school developed speed networking events in order to prepare students for introduction into the workplace while serving as a demonstration of how they engage their students with the business community. The benefits of hosting a Speed Networking event are numerous. Stakeholders who gain from these events include students, potential employers, alumni and those who wish to demonstrate business school impact and engagement. In addition to providing guidance in planning and executing the event, the paper provides details regarding how to recruit students, recruit professionals and best promote, create, and execute an experiential learning Speed Networking event.
Minimizing uncivil student behavior is fundamental to developing a positive learning climate in the classroom. Draggles and Wowzers is a 45-minute role playing exercise that helps students develop an understanding of uncivil behavior and its impact on learning. It is based on the fable presented in “The ABC’s of Uncivil Behavior in the Classroom,” a book that is built on the premise that stories are more effective than cognitive based strategies in inspiring positive learning behaviors. In this enjoyable exercise, students role play Draggle behaviors and attempt to intervene in helpful and unhelpful ways with varying degrees of success. In involving the entire class in debriefing the role plays, students become more conscious of the need to avoid disrespectful behavior and intervene when it occurs.
The gamification is a motivational methodology that includes mechanical and dynamic games, not used in recreational activities. Applied to personal finance, shows the importance of balance between income and expense, providing tools for the rational process of making financial decisions. The game is designed to teach this methodology, to strengthen the knowledge, applied to students of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and professionals of administrative and non-administrative areas. It is identified with the gamification the individual faces financial decisions as a fun way, increasing the knowledge, and at the end of the game all the participants had a similar level.
Beginning with Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler’s forays into graph theory to the development of cancer drugs based on cellular networks, the mathematical tools developed for under-standing the structure and behavior of networks have allowed us to more rigorously explore complex social phenomena. The ABSEL organization is a complex social system that can be regarded as a network of interconnected researchers. With co-authorship data from the past fifteen years of ABSEL confer-ences, we have modeled the ABSEL network using the social network analysis tool Gephi. By exploring the structure, stabil-ity, and dynamic development of the ABSEL co-authorship net-work, we gain insight into the past, present, and future of the organization. With this insight we can formulate policies to increase the value of being a part of ABSEL’s network.
Many books describe Supply Chain Collaboration (SCC), an important idea in the business world. Numerous successfulexamples of SCC are described in these books. Basic contents of teaching SCC at a university are explanation of SCC’stheory and successful case studies. Moreover, some teachers use SCC computer games in the lecture as educationalassistance. Regarding development of a SCC computer game themselves, the more they want to teach SCC knowledge, themore the computer game becomes complicated. These cir-cumstances are satisfied by teachers, but students might feelembarrassment. Students, except some very good students, assume that managing SCC theory and many parameters foroperating SCC computer game are extremely difficult, such that they can not be used. To resolve these misunderstandings,the authors developed simple SCC analogue games. As de-scribed in this report, the basic idea of BASE SCC games and theeducational effectiveness of applying SCC games to the lec-ture of SIIT Thammasat University are introduced.
We distinguish between design complexity, which is an attribute of an exercise, and action complexity, which is the extent to which participants of an exercise act in a variety of ways. We propose that the action complexity of an exercise be measured by calculating the I‡2 of the difference between the minimum-action and actual-action states of key decisions by the participants of the exercise. We suggest applications, and consider if action complexity might be used to measure the effectiveness of an educational game. We describe the design of our multinational business game, and find in a 235-undergraduate, one-semester administration of the game to two subpopulations that, as hypothesized, (a) the action complexity of participants’ nationality in the game corresponds with the participants’ personal performance scores at the midpoint and endpoint of the games’ duration, and (b) the same measure also corresponds with the relative personal performance scores of the two subpopulations. We conclude that action complexity may be a better measure of the effectiveness of an educational game than conventional surveys and test scores, and may also be better than the number of decisions per period, an established design complexity measure.
The purpose of this research project is to provide a detailed case study of the creation and five-year-long evolution of a vi-sion for a curricular innovation. Jacht Ad Lab is based on themodel of situated learning as proposed by Lave and Wenger (1991), a framework that can serveas a response to the pres-sures and changing demands of both the institutions where we teach and the industries that employ our graduates. The goal is to illustrate the potential that the concept of experiential educa-tion known as legitimate peripheral participation can offer for learning in new ways within communities of practice.
Simulations are an important part of capstone strategy courses - they facilitate transfer of training by providing “learning-by-doing†opportunities to the students. They also allow instruc-tors to provide authentic activities situated amidst relevant con-text, enable learners to grasp not just ‘how’ an activity must be done, but the ‘why,’ the ‘what, and the ‘with whom.’ Simula-tions have become an accepted part of strategy classes both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. One area that has not been fully explored is the impact of teamwork on simulation results. Professors using simulations believe anecdotally what the literature on teamwork has suggested for decades: the qual-ity of team processes is directly correlated to the quality of team results. However, detailed measurements are lacking. This pa-per uses a graduate strategy course as an exploratory study to see if there was a relationship between teamwork and team re-sults. It then includes a just completed graduate course to pro-vide additional data for this study which illustrates some of the complexity in evaluating team performance.
In this paper we present justification for developing improved debriefing techniques for total enterprise simulations. We also draw on learning theory to describe the appropriate steps to follow in proper debriefing.
Organizational behavior, often included as core business curriculum, instructs students how individuals and teams successfully work within organizations. This theory-based course, which often utilizes case studies, can be challenging to transform into a hands-on, applied learning approach. This paper presents an experiential course design for organizational behavior around the theme of summiting Mount Everest. This model utilizes a variety of activities, along with a short computer simulation, in order to immerse students into the experience of ascending the famous mountain. Students encounter what it is like to maintain individual motivation, communicate effectively, develop trust within their team, build a culture, and experience conflict and change, all while designing a successful organization. The course begins with researching the individuals who made the first successful summit of Mt. Everest, which is then followed by a simulated summit attempt with their climbing team, and finally, a merger of the teams to create a world-class climbing expedition organization. This experiential learning design creates an environment that challenges students to apply and test approaches, discover solutions and personalize the task to bring greater meaning and learning to organizational behavior theory.
Teaching values provides a particularly difficult challenge, relative to teaching concepts. We define concepts as the knowledge structures and thought processes by which students classify elements of a situation and identify the patterns of cause and effect. Values are defined as the relative importance students place on their interests and objectives. While it is relatively easy for a teacher to illustrate the importance of concepts to students’ interests and objectives, it is much more difficult for teachers to influence the interests and objectives themselves. While concepts are attempts to objectively represent reality, interests and objectives tend to be seen as subjective expressions of each student’s unique personality. However, students’ interests and objectives can be influenced by education, and some interests and objectives are more desirable than others from the perspective of society, employers, and the students’ own well-being. This paper addresses the problem of teaching values from the perspective of motivational theory and Kolb’s experiential learning theory. Kolb’s theory suggests that the degree of involvement in an experiential exercise will determine the degree to which students internalize the consequences of their decisions, and hence, are motivated to reassess their values.
This study provided an opportunity to look across disciplines and beyond regular roleplaying and standard digital-based business games to a successful, long running unique blended simulation in a different yet related field. The lessons learned from the “anywhere anytime†simulation design for undergrad-uates in Political Science at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, provide guidance for the design of a similar simulation model for use in undergraduate business courses. The results of the data collected through surveys, focus groups, interviews and field observations during the weeklong simulation suggest that students are highly engaged and productive. Participants antic-ipated they would be both highly engaged and highly stressed during the experience, and those expectations were realized. A community was created during the week and the instructor in-volvement and modeling positively influenced the outcomes. Some gender differences in expectations and engagement were found. Sixteen design principles were distilled from the study for use in a future business simulation.
The Web-based Cost of Production Performance Package ena-bles competing participant teams to improve company profita-bility through cost control. They assess the underlying reasons for any increase in the cost of production for each product with-in their brand portfolio during each decision period. This deci-sion support package (a) extracts and presents industry R&D expenditures on cost of production reduction through process improvement, company market share, company and industry shipments, and company ending inventory and overtime produc-tion in units for each product from the simulation results, and (b) identifies the antecedents of the cost of production for each product. Competing participant teams use this package to exer-cise marketing control. They set cost of production goals, moni-tor performance, identify deviations, understand the underlying reasons, take corrective action and thereby exercise marketing control.
DECA is a national not-for-profit educational corporation that sponsors marketing competitions for students at the state or regional and international levels. The paper presents a case study of a highly successful program initiative aimed at achiev-ing student success and institutional recognition through the DECA competitions. It describes the nature of the DECA com-petitions, the strategy employed to achieve student success, and the actual results of the program initiative. In the process, it analyzes the experience from the perspective of experiential learning theory, drawing generalized conclusions that might be applied by other institutions in DECA competitions, other extra-curricular experiential programs, and experiential programs in general.
The development and application of educational games has firmly established itself in the fields of business economics and political science, both for the purpose of vocational and further training as well as the research of complex systems and the partly dynamic structures included therein. Hitherto, this does not entirely apply to technically-oriented fields like for instance the engineering, natural or computer sciences, in which plans or endeavors are frequently realized with project orientation. In accordance with the German Standard DIN 69901, a project is a complex, previously unknown, unique, target-oriented and temporally limited plan or initiative, collaboratively implemented either by an individual or a specific group of contributors to realize a defined quality for a specific purpose. Interestingly enough, this definition demonstrates a notable analogy to common definitions of educational games, allowing the deduction that especially the method of educational simulation & gaming can deliver a valuable contribution to vocational and further training in project-oriented industries, potentially even serve as a forecasting or optimization tool. Currently it appears impossible to determine the specific reasons for the limited application of educational games in the technically-oriented disciplines. Nevertheless, these reasons can be expected to have historical origin or depend on subject-related issues within the culture of the profession. In contrast to that, experience shows whilst a general interest in educational simulations and their methodology frequently exists, the necessary methodological and subject-related didactic know-how is yet unavailable. To overcome the barriers existing to date for the application of educational simulations in the above-mentioned domains, this contribution presents a 12 stages development framework for the straightforward conceptualization and modular refinement of educational simulations with special orientation towards the project-oriented industries. After introducing the theoretical background of the framework the game development process is presented as an example by using a wind energy project (converter platform).
