Dr Yun Chen, University of Salford
Video
Introduction
This case study will explore technology innovation activities and research undertaken in Salford Business School, taking the BSc Digital Business programme as an example. It is structured in terms of ‘Teaching Innovation Activities’, which explains various technologies the teaching team have developed and adopted to support teaching practice and engage deep learning; ‘Teaching Innovation Research’, where the constructionist teaching approach in the module design and pedagogic research undertaken internationally will be discussed. The case study is concluded with ‘Teaching Outcomes’, which are about NSS results and the students’ feedback on the programme.
Teaching Innovation Activities: IS development to support teaching and Learning
Blended Teaching is an institutional approach to integrate digital strategies with the traditional values of classroom-based teaching. This approach has been proven to both enhance and expand the effectiveness and efficiency of teaching and learning in HE across disciplines (Garrison and Vaughan, 2008). In HE practices, applying digital innovation in learning activities can enhance students’ engagement and support academic staff’s teaching practice, especially in this COVID-19 situation.
At Salford Business School, the teaching team have a range of experience of developing the learning environment and teaching methods using digital tools that are appropriate to the level of the cohort and to the academic programme. Let us take the BSc Digital Business programme as an example. BSc Digital Business was called BSc Business Information Tech in/before the Academic Year 2019/2020. The programme aims to help students become the best of themselves. It is all about opportunities and employability for everyone and has embedded the skillsets required in industry in the learning with live projects or case studies, such as:
- Designing Information Systems and Strategies in organisations
- E-Commerce website development, promotion and SEO;
- App wireframe & prototype development;
- Presenting business ideas using promotional videos
- Digital workplace skills;
- Emerging technologies application, business model innovation.
At the programme level, innovative activities using IS across programmes in UG Induction Week and University’s Open Day/Applicant Visiting Day have been developed for student engagement, such as an Online Treasure Hunt based on Google Maps, where students can familiarise themselves with the University’s facilities and industrial partners etc. through a simple gamification (One example can be seen in Figure 1 below – Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce is an important industrial partner of Salford Business School. They have been actively involved in the teaching, placements, and employable activities of the School). It helps with students’ engagement with the University life and was well-received by our new starters; Before the pandemic, the programme team designed and ran innovative activities to stimulate students’ learning interest in the digital business field from Day 1, such as showing the legacies of mobile devices and playing retro games (e.g. Street Fighter, Super Mario and Battle City) with the students using Raspberry Pi and self-made joy-sticks. Together with discussion on emerging tech on mobile/ games (e.g., Artificial Intelligence, Robotic Process Automation and Mobile 3.0) nowadays and their applications in the business field, digital business students are able to see the business IT evolution process and design implications in a relaxing atmosphere and start to engage in their University life and the programme study journey at an early stage. (An example of introduction week for Academic Year 2018/2019 can be seen here: https://twitter.com/yunisooc/status/1042020782208106498?s=20).
Employability is key to Higher Education. Technologies have also been adopted creatively to understand students’ individual circumstances and the requirements of career support. For example, in order to understand individual students’ career goals, where they are (physically) in COVID-19, and support their transition through HE & employment aspirations in a more specific way, students can use developed IS to find their location to add their names and their desired career goals. With this map, the teaching team has a better idea on the diversity of students’ requirements for support; a LinkedIn Group has also been set up for the programme (Please see link: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13609359/), inviting the programme team, all current and graduated digital business students to join. The group has 105 members at the moment and they have good posts on graduation, internship and placement opportunities from the teaching team and digital business alumni. The platform also provides good opportunities to students to talk to other level cohorts and network with industry (via graduates) to foster a supportive and effective learning environment. In the University’s Open Days and Applicant Visiting Days, this LinkedIn group has been an attractive point of the programme for cohort identity.
At the module level, with most teaching being online in the Academic year 2020/2021, all UG/PG modules at Salford Business School are moving from a traditional curriculum centred around face-to-face lectures/tutorials to a student-centred learning curriculum, incorporating many cloud tools and learning platforms via a virtual classroom, such as Mentimeter (https://www.mentimeter.com/), Padlet (https://padlet.com/), Slido (https://www.sli.do/), Socrative (https://www.socrative.com/), Kahoot (https://kahoot.it/), Bob (https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand) and LinkedIn Learning (https://www.linkedin.com/learning). As core modules for Digital Business students, the majority of assignments require students to produce digital portfolios. It is important to ensure inclusive teaching and assignment support, so that students are not disadvantaged by having no access to certain required technologies. E.g. in the Mobile App development module, I adopt flexible and easy-to-access platforms for student assessment, so that they can produce an App prototype and present their ideas to the client in a professional way, such as App Inventor 2, Adobe XD (https://www.adobe.com/uk/products/xd.html), Drawio (https://app.diagrams.net), and Justinmind (https://www.justinmind.com). As free and cloud computing software, these tools allow students to work on their prototypes anywhere anytime instead of just in lab rooms. Various components of Microsoft Office 365 are also used effectively within the module teams to enhance seamless teaching collaboration at this difficult time.
Teaching Innovation Research: Constructionist Teaching approach in module design and pedagogic research in HE
Promoting the importance of participating in HE inclusively is one of the key goals at Salford Business School. It encourages academic staff to use research to inform effective and innovative teaching approaches to support quality student learning. It is a good practice to shape the approach and philosophy of teaching/learning via pedagogic and IS-related research and to keep continuous professional development.
The module design in BSc Digital Business is evidence informed with references taken from a variety of literature about educational innovation and inclusion. For example, the Level 5 Mobile Application Development module adopts a Constructionist Teaching Approach (Fullan et al., 2017; Laurillard et al., 2013) to teaching hands-on app development. The curriculum focuses on both theory building and ways of making the curriculum more inclusive and beneficial for all students in practice. As suggested by Constructionist Teaching, learning occurs more effectively when learners are involved in a process of knowledge construction, rather than passively receiving information. As a result, the module is linking teaching and assessment with research to enable knowledge construction and independent critical thinking, such as working on the research project The Kidney Information Network (KIN, www.kinet.site) to produce a digital health app (assignment in Academic year 2020/2021); working with North Manchester Diabetes Centre to produce the Ulcer mobile app (Assignment in Academic Year 2019/2020). The teaching also involves research projects currently going on in Salford Business School, which are related to Mobile technology, such as the Salford Location-Based Service App project to show students the advanced mobile 3.0 tech and how it could be applied in the real world. The constructionist teaching approach was presented in the 6th Engage HEI Conference: Impact and Practice and has been well-received by students since it started to run in 2016. Due to the nature of this module, content needs to be reviewed and updated regularly to ensure students’ time with us is as beneficial as possible and that the course is relevant to the needs of employers.
There are also some publications at the School in technology innovation, such as a comparative study on mobile tech applications in organisational learning in the UK and China (Chen and Zhang, 2019) dwelling at some length on the need for the development of blended teaching, which is more suitable to today’s diverse student body, which respects individual learners, and which recognises the need to diversify and internationalise the HE curriculum. In addition, a few academic visits to China have been made in the past few years to understand the wider context in which HE operates. The Chinese HEI I have been working with include the Jiangsu University of Science and Technology (Twitter link: https://twitter.com/yunisooc/status/1118883859485978624?s=20), Chongqing Jiaotong University (Twitter link: https://twitter.com/yunisooc/status/885711288738893824?s=21) and Xidian University. By discussing the teaching approach and activities with Chinese scholars, the UK scholars have opportunities to effectively evaluate their professional practices in an international context to understand diverse learning communities in a better way.
Teaching Outcomes: NSS result and students’ feedback
At the programme level, BSc Digital Business achieved a 100% ‘Overall Student Satisfaction’ rate in the National Students Survey (NSS) 2020, with a 100% survey completion rate. 93% of students asked agreed that teaching on this course is good; 94% agreed the course is well organised and running smoothly and 100% agreed the course has challenged them to achieve their best work (NSS, 2020). The programme also achieved an average of over 85% across all the questions in the survey (The University average for these questions was 78%). In addition, the programme has received the School Reward for ‘Highest Overall Satisfaction’ and ‘Highest Scorer for Teaching’. The teaching team are extremely pleased with the learning experience of high quality that this programme has provided to the students. Students’ comments on the programme are that it is an ‘excellent and comprehensive degree’ and the study is ‘absolutely an incredible journey’.
At the module level, resources are used to collect data from for evaluating the effectiveness of teaching in both qualitative and quantitative terms, such as the Module Survey Report, Blackboard and the University’s engagement app Jigsaw (https://jigsaw.salford.ac.uk) from the learners’ point of view, teaching observations and feedback from peers. It was nice to see students’ comments approving the teaching methods and activities across the modules in the BSc Digital Business programme, such as they acknowledge the teaching staff as follows: “very knowledgeable and friendly lectures who is incredibly good at engaging students within the class and excels at giving feedback from assignments and questions’ and modules ‘were well structured and helpful’. The UG modules, e.g. the Mobile App Development module discussed in the previous section, were also highly appreciated by both students and external examiners for every single run. In the University’s Module Survey, 100% of participants agreed ‘Overall, I am satisfied with the quality of the module.’ And students commented ‘the teaching team is amazing and knowledgable’; One quotation from feedback of external examiners is: “Exceptionally challenging assignment brief that provides the students with the opportunity to develop an application on their own terms not only from their learning, but also within a commercial setting’ The criteria are clear and clearly delineate the grade bands and are a helpful tool for the candidates taking the examination.”
Conclusion
In the post-Covid world, the BSc Digital Business programme will continue with resilient teaching for diversity, inclusion and student mobility, aiming to set up a ‘hybrid campus’ (Cresswell, 2020; Selingo, J. et al., 2021) using creative technologies with a smoother float between online and classroom teaching to enable students’ deep learning, enhance students’ learning experiences and equip students with a wide range of employability skills.
References
Chen, Y. and Zhang, Y., 2019. Culture and Context Impact on Mobile Tech Application in Organisational Learning: Case Study of UK Higher Education Institution and Chinese State-Owned Enterprise. Book Chapter of Mobile Technologies for Educational Organisations. IGI Global Publication.
Cresswell, T., 2020. Valuing mobility in a post COVID-19 world, Mobilities (online first)
Fullan, M. et al., 2017. Deep Learning: Engage the World, Change the World.
Garrison, D. R. and Vaughan, N. D., 2008. Blended Learning in Higher Education: Framework, Principles, and Guidelines. 1st ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Laurillard, D, Charlton, P, Craft, B, Dimakopoulos, D, Ljubojevic, D, Magoulas, G, Masterman, E, Pujadas, R, Whitley, E.A, and Whittlestone, K., 2013. A Constructionist Learning Environment for Teachers to Model Learning Designs. In: Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 29.1 (2013): 15-30.
National Student Survey, 2020. Office for Students, weblink: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/
Selingo, J., Clark, O. Noone, D. and Wittmayer, A., 2021. The Hybrid Campus: three major shifts for the post-COVID university, Deloitte Insights report. (online first)
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