By W. Howe, Dean of Academic Affairs
Like most universities today, CIBU has had to adapt to the changing times. Part of such adaptation has been the move to increasingly engaging, exciting teaching strategies. The old “sage on the stage” strategy is frequently looked at as anachronistic in higher education today, particularly with research over decades now indicating that students learn more successfully, are more motivated and engaged, and remember their learning and use it later when they are actively involved in the class and engage in meaningful exchanges with peers and instructor. Stanford University School of Medicine, for example, notes the following on its website:
Interactive learning actively engages the students in wrestling with the material. It reinvigorates the classroom for both students and faculty. Lectures are changed into discussions, and students and teachers become partners in the journey of knowledge acquisition.
Research from the fields of education, learning theory, cognitive science, and neuroscience provides abundant evidence that engaged, interactive learning is the most effective way to transmit usable knowledge to students.
At CIBU we take the call for engaging, exciting teaching strategies seriously, though like most universities that include faculty who may have been nurtured on older models, we still have much to do to help faculty transition to newer, perhaps less familiar strategies. Nevertheless, we can be proud of what we are doing at present even as we seek to continue developing more interactive, engaging teaching and learning.
To be sure, our marketing and entrepreneurship courses are taking the lead in promoting interactive strategies. They are utilizing engaging case studies, for example, wherein students actively discuss decision making, managerial styles, personnel issues, and out-of-the-box thinking with specific business scenarios in mind. In addition, they examine real products in the classroom and engage in discussions about how those products are marketed effectively today and how they might be marketed even more effectively tomorrow.
Other courses are taking students into the field to visit and interact with leaders of exciting, relevant, and often highly innovative organizations or even to participate in multi-day “experiences” that include intensive engagement with cutting-edge businesses that help make classroom learning come alive. Business Law courses include a visit to the court room, with the visit this fall term focusing on a billion dollar case that has enormous ramifications for healthcare throughout the United States. Yet another course asks students to engage in teams with San Diego-based businesses and their leaders and to develop a report with recommendations for possible improvement of those businesses.
Further strategies are equally engaging: simulations that require moral/ethical decisions that affect people’s lives; role play exercises in which students enact leadership and followership roles; guest speakers who are well recognized entrepreneurs and who display the unique products they have developed; problem-based learning activities wherein students seek to solve simulated or real business problems; and debates on a variety of contemporary business issues.
Our faculty are also considering projects for the future that will move the university to even more exciting and engaging teaching and learning – e.g., student-selected speakers who are interviewed and face provocative student-generated questions; peer-based teaching in which students teach each other and provide thoughtful feedback and critique to each other; a “CIBU Studio” that will feature podcasts and possibly even a CIBU channel; an incubator space for the development and display of student business products; and competency-based education through which students in a course develop measurable competencies important to today’s business world.
Again, like other universities, we are evolving, and part of that evolution is an increasing emphasis on useful, practical, relevant skills developed through interactive, engaged teaching and learning. In many ways CIBU is ahead of the curve and seeking to bring exciting strategies to the classroom and to the local and global businesses to which we are, through our diverse student population and our educational programs, closely linked.
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