Teaching Activities - Paul McAfee - Experiential and Applied Learning

Skills Students Need - Importance of Experiential Learning

5/26/2022

McKinsey: These are the skills you will need for the future of work. This graphic appears in the article on Page 3 as Exhibit 1.

My recent research has explored the contrasts between teaching using exclusively lectures and exams and teaching using experience associated with the material students are learning. This is important because I believe that students learn and remember what they do better than what they read, cram, and regurgitate on exams. I believe that students need to internalize what they are learning so that they will be able to apply this to their future lives and careers.

The broadest term for this is experiential learning. Governments globally have recognized that education should evolve to teach the skills and competencies students will need - in addition to teaching the basic academic content. Here are two examples:

Canada establishes a Pan Canadian Global Competencies Framework for Education: http://www.ibe.unesco.org/en/news/canada-establishes-pan-canadian-global-competencies-framework-education
21st Century Competencies - Singapore Ministry of Education: https://www.moe.gov.sg/education-in-sg/21st-century-competencies

In 2021, McKinsey published an article listing 56 foundational skills students should develop to prepare for their lives and careers. The article, titled "McKinsey: These are the skills you will need for the future of work," is available online at https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/defining-the-skills-citizens-will-need-in-the-future-world-of-work/. The introduction states:
"To future-proof citizens’ ability to work, they will require new skills—but which ones? A survey of 18,000 people in 15 countries suggests those that governments may wish to prioritize."

As a teacher, I continuously search for ways to help my students develop at least some of these skills while they are learning the academic material in my courses. Students whose prior education comprised almost exclusively lectures and exams become frustrated with the activities that require them to develop and employ these skills. By the end of a semester, some students finally get what they were doing and benefit from their work. Sadly, many students are so resistant that they don't understand. Yet all of these students will enter the workforce, where they will need these skills.

Understand why you teach the way you do so that you can explain it to your students.

Tell your students why you teach the way you do.

#ExperientialLearning #21stCenturyCompetencies #SoftSkills

Recent UNC Asheville Graduate lydia nielsen Discusses the value of project-based-learning

9/30/2020

University of North Carolina Asheville 2020 graduate Lydia Nielsen talks about the value of project-based learning with her marketing instructor, Paul McAfee.

Lydia Nielsen, a spring 2020 University of North Carolina management graduate, was on a Promotion Management marketing project team that produced an actionable Playbook with promotion recommendations for the local non-profit OM Sanctuary (https://omsanctuary.org/).

Since graduating, Lydia has used the Playbook she and her team created for job interviews. Listen as Lydia explains the value that Project-Based-Learning is bringing to her after graduation. Click here to listen to Lydia's story: vimeo.com/456229272

#unca #uncasheville #management #project-based-learning #pbl #experientiallearning #highereducation

More about Academic Integrity in Our Changed World

6/15/2020

Please take two minutes to read the article at this link from a Singapore newspaper:

"NUS students get zero marks for cheating on take-home exam"

As students take more college courses online, either fully or in a hybrid seated+online configuration, getting the students to maintain academic integrity increases dramatically. It simply is too easy for a student to cheat if they are taking an exam or writing a paper online with no oversight -- i.e., without proctoring. Why does this matter to me? Two simple reasons:

Students who study to learn the material feel cheated by students who collaborate or plagiarize on exams.

Some students -- think nurses, accountants, engineers, doctors, and other professional practitioners -- will be expected to have actually learned what they studied when they start to practice medicine, design buildings and bridges, or handle corporate and personal accounts.
In a recent year, partway through a semester in a capstone strategic management course I taught in Singapore, I was talking with my students about academic integrity. One student raised his hand and I called on him. He said, and this is a verbatim quote: "Professor, it isn't cheating if you don't get caught." This actually happened!

After discovering that exam scores were significantly higher -- i.e., 20% or more higher -- with online multiple-choice question (MCQ) exams, I did an experiment in one of these capstone courses. I put a low-stakes MCQ exam online, scheduling it to be open for 30 minutes during a regular seated class session. The exam was intended to be taken independently, not collaboratively. The students had ten minutes to complete the exam during the 30-minute window. They started in the classroom, and then could go wherever they wanted to complete the exam during that 30-minute window.

I gave the students a countdown to the start of the exam, and the second the exam window opened, about 75% of the students ran out of the classroom to the tables in the hallways to form groups to take the exam together. The remaining 25% of the students stayed in the classroom. I had told everyone that they should take the exam the way the normally would, so they did. One group at a large table had a single student take the exam during the first 10-minute block and watched that student, advising him if he was unsure of the answer. When he finished they regrouped into three smaller groups and then watched and advised the one student in their smaller group has he or she took the exam. Finally, the remaining students went to their computers to take the exam in the last 10-minute block, with the students who had completed the exam watching and helping.

I knew this behavior existed from a few years back, when I discovered extremely high scores on a Masters-level online exam that -- are you ready for this -- nursing students were taking. Eventually, one of the students in the class complained. To her -- she had studied hard for the exam and had taken it by herself as instructed -- it was unfair that other students had high grades without actually learning the material. She had observed students in her class taking the exam in teams at computers in the library.

Many of my friends feel it is unfair to use plagiarism checking tools, or online exam monitoring tools. We would proctor the exam in the classroom. Why should we not proctor it online? And how do we treat the students who learn the material who feel cheated by the students who do not learn but plagiarize or get help during online exams?

Of course, we could stop giving MCQ exams. But students can cheat in online essays or open-ended question exams just as easily. I use the MCQ exams only to confirm that the students are reading and understanding the course material. I even give the students the subject of every question on the exam a week ahead. These exams account for a relatively small portion of the final grade. If I catch a student cheating on one of these, the student most likely will fail the course. But I need the monitoring tools for online exams to catch the cheating. (And yes, I use question pools and random question delivery to limit cheating. I've had a student answer a write-in question that wasn't on his delivered online exam because someone else had told him the question that the other student had received and this student gave the answer to that question.)

I use Project-Based-Learning methods with students working together all semester in teams. We could just give team-based grades. But if you teach, you know there are a lot of social loafers who expect the other team members to do the work, but expect the same grades as their team members.

I hate online exam monitoring. We must use it; out of fairness to students who try to learn the material, and because students will be expected to know what we teach when they start their careers.

This article, about online cheating in an Engineering program at the National University of Singapore (NUS), illustrates the problem. Congratulations to NUS both for giving the students zero grades, and noted their academic integrity failure in their permanent records. If we sanction students for cheating, and have ways to identify cheating, we may be able to reduce the "It isn't cheating if you don't get caught" mentality.

#college #highereducation #academicintegrity #integrity #honesty #onlineeducation #onlineexam

Experiential Learning in the Age of Online Education

4/22/2020

University of North Carolina Asheville marketing students participating in an event at OM Sanctuary.

How do we manage the transition?

As I've written here in the past, I am a strong advocate of experiential learning in higher education. I especially prefer to use Project-Based Learning in my business courses. Student work in small teams for the full semester to complete a complex project that either is real-life - such as helping develop a marketing plan for a local company or non-profit - or is a realistic business simulation. Transitioning these projects to online delivery is no easy task.

Grading papers this morning, I received some encouraging feedback from students in their reflection sections. Here is one example relating to a simulation we use in our Strategic Management course:

"The Business Strategy course has been one of my favorite courses taken throughout my undergraduate career due to its exposure and application of its content to the real world. The Business Simulation Game has given me the opportunity to see and put into practice the material learned in other classes and see how decision really affects a company."

The image with this article was from one of my Marketing courses where the students worked in teams to help develop marketing plans for the local non-profit wellness organization OM Sanctuary - https://omsanctuary.org/. The image was from a class visit to OM Sanctuary to participate in one of their programs so that they had first-hand experience in their client's work. This semester, we are working with OM Sanctuary again, but there will not be any class visits. Instead, we have had to move the project to completely online, working remotely with the client to develop a promotional campaign that itself will be online. So far, both the students and the client's managers are satisfied with the outcome.

My capstone Strategic Management students were lucky, in the sense that although we had seated classes until the spring break, all of their course materials already were online. And they were luck because our Project-Based Learning activity was in the form of a semester-long Internet-based business strategy simulation. They were already working online in their teams to conduct weekly data analysis and make decisions for their simulation companies. The simulation is called the Business Strategy Game (BSG) and is offered through McGraw-Hill as a companion to several of its textbooks.

I ask students to reflect at the end of the semester in a final paper. Here is the second of the encouraging Strategic Management student reflections.

"This course has helped me understand business strategy through the use of BSG primarily. BSG is a really good way to teach students how to make decisions and understand the consequences of each decision. Hands-on learning is the best way for anyone to learn, because it gives you practice in a field and also allows you to fail. Failing occurs in real life as well, but it is better to learn through a simulation, so you know what to do and what not to do in the real world. It gives you a sense of experiential learning before launching into a real business."

Let's see what happens when the fall semester arrives. Will we be in classrooms? Will we be online? Or will we have a combination of these?

#experientiallearning #onlinelearning #projectbasedlearning #uncasheville #highereducation

Project-Based Learning for marketing students at UNC Asheville

1/29/2020

UNC Asheville Media Design Lab Manager Sasha Hussey hosted our Marketing Promotion students on Monday. Sasha introduced the students to the amazing resources available in the Media Lab and explained the resources in the TV Studio.

The Marketing Promotion students are working in small teams with two local companies to develop Integrated Brand Promotion campaigns for the organizations. Three teams are working with non-profit OM Sanctuary (https://omsanctuary.org/), and three teams are working with the Asheville Plato's Closet store (https://www.platoscloset.com/location/asheville-nc/).

The students have access to recording equipment with sound booths, computers, software, cameras, and other resources they can use to develop their campaigns. The staff and volunteers at the Media Design Lab will work with the students to help them use the equipment and software.
This is Project-Based Learning at its best (in my not necessarily humble opinion).

#unca #uncasheville #newmedia #integratedbrandpromotion #marketingpromotion #projectbasedlearning

UNC Asheville Marketing Students working with non-profit OM Sanctuary

1/23/2020

Thank you to Mary Liske, Wellness Coordinator, for a hugely productive and engaging conversation with our UNC Asheville Marketing Promotion students last night.

Three teams of Marketing Promotion students will develop promotional campaigns for non-profit OM Sanctuary during this semester in a process called Project-Based Learning. They will be applying what they are learning in the course as they work with OM Sanctuary as their Integrated Brand Promotion (IBP) client to meet the client's goals.

Project-Based Learning is one form of experiential learning. In this Marketing Promotion course, the students work all semester to develop an Integrated Brand Promotion campaign to support goals set by OM Sanctuary.

OM Sanctuary is officially known as Oshun Mountain Sanctuary. This non-profit organization was formed in 2012 as a response to the increasing number of people of all ages, cultures, and income levels seeking holistic and healthy methods for stress reduction, living in balance, embracing sustainable practices, and bringing inspiration into their personal and professional lives.

#projectbasedlearning #experientiallearning. #omsanctuary #uncasheville #maryliske #universityofnorthcarolina #asheville #integratedbrandpromotion

Your Next Career Might be in Higher Education

12/20/2019

Delivering an experiential learning seminar at the University of Science in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 2018.

If you are like me and have had a great multi-decade career in professional roles, and you are not ready to settle into a quiet retirement, then consider teaching. Although I have not explored teaching in K-12 programs recently, that could be an option. A few years ago, I applied to Teach for America, went through hours of interviews, to the very last one-on-one interview, and then was not selected. I suspect age is the reason. I decided not to bother with K-12 after that, as I already had a couple years of higher education teaching experience in China, Vietnam, and the U.S.A. Stick with me here and I'll share an excellent resource at the end of this post.

My point here is that you should have better chance in higher education. This is especially so if you have years of senior leadership experience in your field, had at least a Master's degree, and want to help the next generation by teaching what you know, and sharing your experiences. My secondary point is that ageism is real. I've experienced it first-hand. In one instance, sitting in a final face-to-face interview for a government agency, I was told a couple times that, and I quote, "You are over experienced for this position." The fact that I drove 10 hours to attend the interview, was interested in the position, and had all of the skills required to do the job, meant nothing.

In another instance, after another 10 hour drive to the final face-to-face interview, the exact words, which I heard three times from the hiring manager, were, "This is a developmental position." Once again, I was fully qualified, interested, and could have been a perfect candidate for the role. But that hiring manager, and the previous one, clearly wanted someone younger in their positions. Neither of these were teaching positions.

Age is less of an issue for adjunct instructors in higher education. In some cases, the experience you have had will help you get the position. Adjuncts are underpaid, but if you aren't in it for the money, the satisfaction of helping a new generation of professionals develop more than offsets the low pay. It is possible that an adjunct role could lead you to a full-time position. What you might find difficult, as I have, and where ageism may come into play, is when or if you apply for tenure track positions. While I haven't had the blatant comments like the ones above, I perceive the difficulty in getting hired into a tenure-track position due to my age as real, and I've basically stopped trying.

I like and enjoy my contract teaching roles. They have taken me to China, Singapore, Vietnam. I've taught for three schools in Buffalo, NY. Currently, I'm halfway through a one-year contract with the University of North Carolina in Asheville, a beautiful - and quirky - mountain city. If your professional career is over - if you aren't ready to settle too much - and if you like helping younger people develop -consider teaching in higher education. Here is a website with tips for older people who want to teach. It addresses the ageism issue directly in its recommendations.

From the Higher Education Recruitment Consortion:

https://www.hercjobs.org/higher-education-job-search-tips-for-older-employees/

Project-Based Learning in Asheville, NC

8/31/2019

My University of North Carolina Asheville Consumer Behavior class is working in teams with local organizations. One team will be working on a consumer marketing project with ASAP - Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project. ASAP manages a Saturday morning farmer's market in downtown Asheville, so I visited this morning to learn more.

Preparing for Behavioral Event Interviews

8/30/2019

Lisa Mann, from the UNC Asheville Career Center, visited both capstone Strategy classes this week to help the students develop the skill of story telling for their future career searches.

This was an experiential process. The students wrote a story that might be relevant in a behavioral event job interview in the Situation - Action - Result (SAR) format. They then shared their stories with students in the class that they didn't know well to get feedback.

Lisa also had them write a story about a time they failed in the SAR format, and share that story with a friend in the room.

All of this is to help them when they graduate, which most will do in December or next May, and in their future careers.

Link to UNC Asheville Career Center: https://www.unca.edu/success/career-center/

Link to Neil Bearden video about story telling: https://vimeo.com/354629176

Link to my LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/preparing-behavioral-event-interviews-paul-mcafee-mba-phd-abd

Strategic Planning & Implementation

7/29/2019

I have begun investigating offering a Strategic Planning & Implementation training program to businesses in the Buffalo/Niagara area. What would make this unique would be the use of the Business Strategy Game (BSG) simulation that I use for my capstone strategic management courses at Canisius College, Daemen College, and the University at Buffalo School of Management in Buffalo, and at the University at Buffalo School of Management business program in Singapore. The target companies would be manufacturing or product distribution companies. This is because the BSG simulation is for a globally manufactured product.

For Buffalo/Niagara area businesses, the benefit would be that members of all functions, such as Engineering, Finance, Manufacturing, Marketing, and Sales, could participate and apply what they know about their function during the planning and decisions-making stages of the simulation, and then see the results. Each function gets to see how its decisions affect the whole business.

The participants in each client company would form teams, with each team acting as an athletic shoe manufacturer. Here are details from the BSG website:
"The co-managers of each company are responsible for assessing market conditions, determining how to respond to the actions of competitors, forging a long-term direction and strategy for their company, forecasting upcoming sales volumes, and making decisions relating to:

Production operations (up to 10 decisions for each plant, with a maximum of 4 plants)
Upgrading plants and expanding/reducing plant capacity (up to 6 decisions per plant)
Worker compensation and training (3 decisions per plant)
Shipping and inventory management (up to 8 decisions each plant/geographic region)
Pricing and marketing (up to 10 decisions in each of 4 geographic regions)
Bids to sign celebrities to endorse their brand of footwear (2 decision entries per bid)
Corporate social responsibility and citizenship (up to 6 decision entries)
Financing of company operations (up to 8 decision entries)"

Learning outcomes for local business managers would include learning about data analysis, understanding strategic planning and decision-making, and seeing the interactive nature of business decisions. Each week of the corporate education program would represent a year of business in the BSG simulation industry.

I share these thoughts now to explore the level of interest. If you think this might be of use in your company, please get in touch with me on my LinkedIn page - www.linkedin.com/in/paulmcafee.

Two of the many data graphs are below, showing relative positions of the teams in one of my recent capstone strategic management courses.

#strategicmanagement #globalstrategy #corporatetraining #experientiallearning #businessstrategygame #strategysimulation

Paul McAfee

My experiential learning Activities blog includes examples from my international teaching experiences. The Research blog includes studies I have read and comments on others' research, as well as my own.

Read about examples from my teaching college business courses in China, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam, relating to both experiential learning and project-based learning.

Please share your questions and thoughts here.

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