Better (Marketing) Education

The first object of any act of learning over and beyond the pleasure it may give, is that it should serve us both in the present and in the future. Learning should not only take us somewhere; it should allow us later to go further more easily.

One of the major objectives of our course, is to build in the pupil a strong and persistent motivation to learn - one that will carry over to his or her everyday activities outside of the classroom as well as into his or her future classrooms.

Our educational methodology must do more than most lectures, that is transmit information to essentially passive students.

Our approach must offer to bridge the the gap between the practicalities of the real world and the theory of study.  (Need for an applied approach)

Current directions in university education now centres around fee paying courses and other financial resources, student numbers, the possible mismatch between the supply of, and demand for, graduates. The fundamental questions about the purposes and functions of higher education institutions today are being lost.

Our course needs to allow students to develop areas of specialised interest within the concept of marketing management.

If we want to improve the quality of learning in our course, we need to move toward a more student-focused approach to learning

We need to recognise that people learn differently. In the ways they organise their work, and in the ways they find meaning.  In order to improve learning, we need to focus our attention on how knowledge is constructed by building on previous knowledge in a learning context.

We need to recognise there will be different ways of presenting (students) work.  (eg. Oral, Video, etc.)

We need to appreciate that learning will be improved if we better understand the notion of competence in a discipline, for example by discovering what separates the novice from the expert.

Means other than by lecturing.

We need to develop better ways of conveying information than by the traditional methods of lecture and tutorial.  When taught by lectures, students tend to disengage from genuine involvement and come to believe that note taking is the same as learning.   The lecture is based on the assumption that teaching involves an expert lecturer giving pre-packaged knowledge to students. Students have to develop their own understandings through active engagement with a topic. 

Meaning and understanding cannot simply be transferred to students.  Students make their own meaning.  The construction of personal knowledge is a personal activity.  Lecturing is one of the least flexible resource students have.  The lecturer cannot easily adjust to the individual's existing ways of seeing things, in the content, pace or manner of treatment of the content of the lecture.  There needs to be more scope for the negotiation and construction of meaning for much development of understanding to take place.

If students come to class with different assumptions about, and preconceptions of, the subject matter, then they will interpret the content of the lecture in different ways, so that they learn different things without our realising that they have done so.

The essential function of lectures is to place knowledge in a meaningful context

Lecturing should never be a substitute for student reading and research. In a discipline such as business and management, which requires skills in application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and communication, which involves important issues of values, we should use the lecture method selectively.

A broader, deeper approach to learning and education.

The approach to education and learning should be holistic.  "Holistic" describes attempts to involve a student in understanding structure through a process of integration in which the student appreciates the relationship between the parts and the whole.  "Atomistic", by way of contrast, refers to a distortion and segmentation in the organisation of information so that the overall structure may be reduced to component parts or broken up

We can promote student learning if:

.       we treat our students as responsible individuals;

·       we urge our students to participate responsibly and to reflect on the meaning of their work by taking an active role in the management and direction of their learning activities;

·       we encourage our students to trust their judgments, use their experiences as a source of knowledge, and search for personal meaning within that knowledge;

·       we urge our students to employ a full range of types of knowledge (tacit, attitudinal, "connected") in addition to propositional knowledge ("know that");

.       we encourage our students to adopt a wide range of approaches to study-,

·       we help our students learn how to self- and peer-assess;

.       we encourage our students to improve their abilities to learn, for example by discovering how they learn and then working to expand their approaches to become better learners;

·       we help our students adopt deep/holistic approaches to learning;

·       we make learning relevant to our student's purposes;

·       we and our students think about learning as an evolutionary process in which directions and goals may change over time;

·       we situate learning in a context so that the learning activity, concept, and culture of the discipline and practice grow and evolve;

·       we set clear aims and objectives for learning on the understanding that certain goals may remain ambiguous because much learning is unpredictable;

·       we demonstrate the skills, attitudes, and knowledge of a "reflective practitioner";

·       we acknowledge and draw upon the rich experiences that students have through an interchange of ideas;

·       we create a climate for learning based on self-esteem, respect, acceptance of difference, and freedom of expression; and

·       our students intend to learn, which is facilitated if the students believe their material is meaningful and useful.  

 Student Centred Education

 In order to help our students increase their capacities and understanding of management, we need to design educational programs which provide for a smooth transition in the locus of control from us (as teachers) to our students.  If, as some evidence indicates, deep (and achieving) processes are associated with an "internal locus of control," we may wish to increase the control that learners have over their own learning if we wish to achieve high quality outcomes

In short, we need to enable students to shift from a "dependent mode" of education, which characterises many students' experiences at secondary school, to different modes of learning, which may include both the " interdependent " and the " independent ".

Treating Students Knowledge and Ideas with Respect

Adult learning is enhanced when learning builds upon students' individual experiences and when students regard their learning as relevant.  To facilitate learning by active engagement, students must feel sufficiently secure and confident to describe and discuss their experiences.  They must feel accepted, respected, and valued.  They must be given latitude to be tentative, make mistakes, and change their ideas without fear of ridicule or censure.   

If we want our students to engage actively in learning by opening themselves up to teaching, we must create a climate in our classrooms-and in our offices and management and business schools-in which there is mutual respect , concern, and tolerance, if not acceptance, of a variety of viewpoints

Although competitiveness and aggression may appear to characterise some aspects of business and management to some, they are inappropriate to promote student learning. competitiveness inhibits the development of a co-operative approach to learning as individuals become tacticians rather than problem solvers.  

Methods of Assessment

The nature of the content or the task to be learned may determine the type of assessment tool to be used

The effectiveness of an assessment task may depend upon the student's age.  Hence, mature-age students seem to prefer tasks which mirror real life, give them more autonomy, and offer more scope for self-expression and the exercise of self-control

Negotiating Assessment

The prevailing model for assessing student work in higher education is an authoritarian one.  Staff exercise unilateral intellectual authority: they decide what students shall learn, they decide the program for learning, they determine criteria of assessment and make the assessment of the student. 

The student does not participate in decision making at all about his learning objectives or ... learning program, nor in setting criteria and applying them in assessment procedures.  He is subject to the intellectual authority of an academic elite who have the power to exercise a very high degree of social control on the exercise of his intelligence and on his future destiny by intellectual grading."

Negotiation can take place over many matters in assessment: actual articles awarded; the timing of assessment; the types of assessment designed; the performance criteria used; and the type of examiner or marker (staff, former student, panel, etc).  From a student's viewpoint, negotiation in education-whether of curriculum, learning objectives, topics of study, assessment schemes, whatever-may "democratise" the classroom, settle student anxiety, and motivate the student to contribute more to the educational process.   

Moreover,  "The key to negotiation, both in theory and in practice, lies in the ownership principle: people tend to strive hardest for things they wish to own, or to keep and enhance things they wish to own, or to keep and enhance things they already own."

In self-marking and self-assessment, students critically analyse their performance to gauge, for example, their current standards of work and to determine whether they are making educational progress.  In self assessment, students set the criteria for their performance and then measure themselves against the criteria.  In self-marking, by way of contrast, the students use established criteria to gauge their progress.  In collaborative self-assessment the teacher and student negotiate a grade on the basis of their evaluation of the student's work against the same criteria.  Marks awarded for any three of these grading techniques can be incorporated into formal assessment or used for summative assessment purposes as part of a regular feedback process.

Computer Assistance in Learning

In computer-assisted learning (CAL), computers are used to present material, principles, and theory to a student, whereas in computer managed instruction (CMI), computers are used to control, administer, and/or test the learning process. 

Carefully designed teaching materials can go beyond these objectives to encourage and challenge students to engage in deep approaches to learning on their own, outside of class, in activities that are realistic, meaningful, and stimulating.

Interactive media

 E Mail and Social Networks

Notes and Instructional Materials

The basic aims of instructional materials should be to provide students with a framework to acquire well-organised and well structured knowledge, in a way that enables students to take what would otherwise be inert "book knowledge" and use it, work it over, apply it, and make it their own.  On the basis of our understanding of how students learn, we should design materials so that our students interact deeply with them.  The materials should be structured so that students are engaged in genuine problem-solving activities,  within a framework that enables them to monitor or regulate their own learning. 

To encourage deep approaches to learning, we may need to reconsider the role of note taking in business and management classes.  Evidence indicates that students do not take accurate notes from lectures and that note taking does not improve student learning Students are unlikely to think creatively if they are engaged in hasty note taking.  Nevertheless, we may wish to adopt teaching methods to facilitate student note taking where appropriate.

We need to make available to students copies of our lecture notes*, summaries of the main points, handouts  and ask students not to concentrate on taking detailed notes.  (*to facilitate their revision of the subject matter.)

Student Led Involvement

Student-led discussion is often used in graduate teaching and increasingly in undergraduate teaching. The benefits of student-led discussion can contribute to a teaching strategy.  These include discussion in the absence of teachers, student papers, student directed classes, and student tutoring. Students retain knowledge longer  and tend to be more responsive and participate more in student-led seminars than in teacher-led seminars.  Students learning in small groups without a teacher tend to be more motivated, curious, and interested in the subject matter than students taught by the lecture method. 

Student-led seminars can involve the presentation of student papers or reports, which are, then, discussed in class.  For example, a topic can be broken up into a number of parts which are allocated to students.  The students, then, give short and concise summaries of the fruits of their research on the topic and class conversation ensues as the students take responsibility for the development of the discussion. 

Students can be given responsibility for one topic, covering one or two classes, or a group of students can be given responsibility for a section of the course.  Although the teacher will structure, define, and organise the topics and assign topics to groups, students assume control of the conduct of the class.  To be effective, students should be encouraged to use whatever method they wish to present the subject matter to class.  In this approach, everyone in the class works as teacher and learner, which gives students a better understanding of the learning process and enables students to work co-operatively.

In a similar process the teacher plays the role of adviser to the student or group.  The teacher offers suggestions during planning, and remains an active member of the class, clarifying or summarising whenever necessary.

Small Group Learning

"Teaching and learning in small groups has a valuable part to play in the all-round education of students. it allows them to negotiate meanings, to express themselves in the language of the subject, and to establish a more intimate contact with academic staff than formal methods permit.  It also develops the more instrumental skills of listening, presenting ideas and persuading.

Syndicate groups are small, teacherless groups of four to six" students.  Students are set a clear task, topic, or problem, and then left to analyse and synthesise the relevant material or solve the problem on their own but within a supportive group environment.  Students develop their own understandings or solutions from their reading and then from discussions.

We can set an assignment for the group, which requires reading, discussion, and written work.  The assignment may include required reading and sequenced questions to be answered by the group.  For example, we may require the group to read a series of cases and some articles on a particular topic.  Each group could be set the same topic or different topics spread throughout the groups.

The students in the group allocate the reading, discussion, and writing tasks amongst themselves and meet during class time to work on the tasks.  Our role is to provide guidance when required by the group and to monitor the progress of the group.  Full class discussions can be held at appropriate moments in the course.  Students report to the class either in writing or orally, and if need be, include dissenting opinions.  We then summarise the topic and the student reports, provide additional material, and suggest changes and improvements to the reports.  The process concludes with a full class discussion. 

In 1991 Griffith University introduced "Offices", teacherless, co-operative learning groups The concept of offices developed by Le Brun is an adaptation of the syndicate groups concept used at the University of Adelaide and of the notion of "houses" developed at the  University of New York.

Students in the first three years of the Griffith integrated law degree program meet weekly in teacherless groups of usually four to ten students to discuss tasks which are set by the teacher responsible for a particular topic in the curriculum.  The groups are designed to facilitate co-operative learning as students develop and refine their understanding of the law in a "situated" learning context.  Students, who are assigned to Offices on the basis of their integrated degree programs, draw up rules to govern' their office work and are expected to operate independently within their rules.  Specific readings are prescribed and activities designed to help students learn to work co-operatively at the same time as they increase their understanding of law.

The Offices program incorporates current educational ideas about group learning and the importance of self, and peer-assessment.  It is designed to help students make the transition from the undergraduate  student to the graduate professional by placing learning in a group learning context.

Small groups have the following benefits.:

.       co-operative learning is encouraged because student participation is valued;

.       students learn how to work with other people and to listen to different points of view;

·       communication about contrary perceptions of the same phenomena is facilitated.

·       students have an opportunity for personal development as they learn how to make judgments about themselves;

·       quiet students, who might not be willing to speak in front of an entire class, can be drawn out;

·       students are personally involved in learning, through their own initiative, insight, and discovery;

·       students can involve themselves in a large number of tasks, which include:

.       -arguing with other students or with us in our role as teachers;

.       discussing a topic, the work of others, their experiences, and their misunderstandings; and

.       -comparing or categorising business phenomena.

·       clarifying or solving a problem, or evaluating a solution;

        -generating ideas;

.       -setting criteria for essays or marking essays;

.       -critically evaluating a case, article, or statute; and

.       -sharing essay plans or study methods.

·       students can undertake tasks on their own and then discuss their work in groups;

·       students have the opportunity to test their understanding of a topic by expounding their learning and comparing it with the contributions of other students;

.       students are provided with an opportunity to satisfy emotional needs which are not normally catered for in  education, particularly the need for social belonging.  This in turn can promote student motivation and commitment to learning; and

·       students can learn to assess the dynamics of a particular group and conduct themselves accordingly

Co-operative learning. 

Senior students can be used as teachers in seminars and tutorials.  Not only does this conserve staff teaching resources, but the student teachers have an opportunity to reinforce their own learning and develop teaching skills. 

Student teachers are more likely to be able to identify with the learning difficulties in the subject experienced by students.  Student "peer mentors" can be used to facilitate group learning activities. Student “proctors" can be involved in individualised instruction of students. 

Older students can counsel younger students when they enter the business and management school and be available to assist with study problems.  Students can form their own self-directed groups.

Peer tutoring, peer learning, and co-operative learning help students to achieve cognitive goals by using instructional materials.  Most students engage in "informal" teaching as part of their learning.  They explain difficult points to one other in the library or over coffee out of class, confer during class, and sometimes form study groups.

Both these approaches attempt to harness the benefits of students learning through teaching their peers.

In peer and co-operative learning, students learn by teaching their peers in pairs and in groups.  The benefits of this approach include:

·       increased personal contact for students with other students;

·       active student involvement in learning; and

·       increased co-operation, motivation and self-esteem.

We as teachers have a vital role in all of these peer learning methods-setting and clarifying objectives, preparing materials, structuring activities, negotiating ground rules, monitoring progress, and intervening to remedy problems that may arise.

Creative Thinking/Learning

Teaching has tended to focus principally on cognitive objectives particularly the acquisition of knowledge and understanding, and the analysis, application, and synthesis of information.  We should also use teaching methods that facilitate creative thinking, explore new relationships between already familiar phenomena, link the emotional and the intellectual sides of learning, and produce imaginative solutions. 

·       facilitates discussions where students are asked to think in a novel way about an issue;

·       encourages students to use their own experiences or instincts to deal with a particular topic or problem;

.       stimulates student participation and thought;

·       helps students develop new perspective’s; and

·       changes the pace of a class.

Managing and administering the approach

Small Groups

Self Learning

Cost

Complexity

Student/staff ratios as well as teaching assignments may be affected.  For example, greater resources, both human and financial, may need to be devoted to the first years of study so that students receive the attention and assistance necessary to acquaint themselves with the discipline so that they are well placed to begin to develop the skills, attitudes, and values which will allow them to work independently and co-operatively.  Again, as may be expected, the adoption of a student-centred approach will also involve a change in our self-conceptions as teachers.