Abstract
This article sheds light on contemporary realities in the design and delivery of final year projects in business degrees. To do so, this article employs an autoethnographic approach to explain the trajectory of conventional to contemporary evolution in the delivery of the teaching and learning in a final year project unit in an undergraduate business degree. In doing so, it presents a new integration of pedagogy—i.e., the LABS pedagogy—that allows replication of a future-ready curriculum for capstone final year project units in business degrees. It is hoped that this article will inspire greater reexamination of university teaching and learning to maintain its currency in preparing learners for their future careers.
I coached a final year capstone unit in an undergraduate business degree offered at an international branch campus of an Australian university. The university was consistently ranked among the best universities in the world each year across various world university rankings. However, I was surprised to find that there were no tangible learning materials (e.g., guides, slides) for the unit. I asked around my colleagues at the university that I taught as well as colleagues from other universities. The common understanding of such a unit was that it was essentially a final year project unit. In such a unit, students were expected to integrate what they had learned throughout the course of their degree (Payne et al., 2002). They were also expected to apply this knowledge by working to solve an issue that an industry client was facing (Robinson et al., 2010). I could see the logic of putting students to the test to see how well they had learned throughout their studies and to expose them to real-life industry conditions (i.e., students were required to develop recommendations to solve a real issue for a real client). However, I could not see how students could cope and perform well without any tangible support. My hunch was, to a certain extent, validated through the teaching satisfaction score for the unit’s past delivery, which is below the aspirational mark of 9 for satisfaction surveys measured on a 10-point scale (Jastania et al., 2017; Woodall et al., 2014). I could have raised this as an issue before the start of the semester, but without any comparative statistics or feedback to show, any recommendations to offer tangible support (e.g., personalized folders, 101 guides, concept slides, and tutorial videos, among others) would have been speculative. Instead, I chose to take up the challenge to create an opportunity where I had the possibility to obtain evidence showing that tangible supports, such as those mentioned above, are appreciated and useful for final year project units.
In addition, I was also perplexed that students were only required to do desktop research (e.g., Google searches, journal articles, news, reports) to develop recommendations to solve a real issue for a real client. I could not understand how anyone would believe something that someone says and recommends, but that they have never actually done. I felt a strong urge to do something to avoid this undesirable situation. If I did not, it would not have done justice to my professional responsibility as an academic in an educational institution where students pay to become better versions of themselves.
However, I also faced a dilemma in deciding how to deliver the teaching and learning for this unit: should I do something popular, or should I do something effective?
If I retained the existing delivery of the unit, but with the addition of the tangible supports that I have previously described and have now provided, that would have been popular with the students, given that there is more support for the same level of challenge. In addition, this would increase the chance of me receiving better unit evaluations that I could then use to support my claim to have a wide range of tangible supports offered for this unit. However, following the conventional way would also mean that the students would be deprived of the opportunity to acquire what I could offer through a new, future-ready contemporary approach that I believed to be valuable for final year project units: that is, to source, evaluate, select, test, and validate approaches before recommending solutions to clients.
It was difficult to decide whether I should follow the conventional or the contemporary approach to delivering the unit, whereby the former requires students to engage in desktop research (e.g., review of secondary sources such as government and news reports), whereas the latter requires students to use evidence-based methods (e.g., field experiment) to formulate practical recommendations. However, I believed that it would only be fair for the students to be given the opportunity to have their say on how they would like to learn after discovering the alternative approaches to learning that could be offered. The opportunity to provide this feedback was given to students at the beginning of the semester in the classroom, and responses were invited via email. The spoken and written feedback received was in favor of the contemporary approach, and hence, the contemporary approach to delivering the unit was chosen. Nonetheless, it should be noted that these students were initially resistant to any ideas that required them to do more work without any reward of marks, but this resistance was mitigated by exposing these students to the alternatives to learning that I could have employed (i.e., conventional versus contemporary) and the extent to which how each alternative could contribute to their learning experience and quality of work (see Table 1).
Conventional Versus Contemporary Approach to Capstone Delivery.
Note. UNESCO = United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
As a result of having to implement and test potential recommendations, students encountered new challenges over the course of the semester that were very different to those they had previously faced in their other units. These challenges were reflective of those that they could expect to encounter in the real world once they graduate, and what employers expect graduates to be able to deal with effectively. The challenges included the ups and downs (e.g., changes in plans), conflicts and dramas (e.g., dealing with difficult people), and late nights (e.g., due to sense of accountability and ownership of individual and collective work and success) of the working world. They also included empathizing with the client and scrutinizing what they actually require, and evaluating and selecting the alternatives to test from a range of approaches that could meet the client’s requirements before deciding whether to recommend a given course of action in their consultancy report and presentation.
To illustrate, 44 students in the capstone had to provide consultancy to a real-life client. The consultancy, using the contemporary approach, required students to implement and test potential solutions before recommending to the client to implement (or not to implement) those solutions. The client was a nonprofit community organizer that actively curates civic empowerment events for youth and young professionals. The client had no presence in the city where the students were located but was interested to set up their operations in that city. As part of the consultancy project in the capstone, the students had to plan, organize, execute, and report on an actual event catering to youth and young professionals in their city. This enabled the students to propose tested solutions as recommendations for the client in their consultancy report and presentation. In the span of 1 month, which was filled with the many assignments and deadlines from the other units they were taking, these students stepped up to show that millennials like themselves are far from the general perception of an entitled and lazy cohort (Lantos, 2014). Through their intellectual and emotional capital, dedication, and hard work, they successfully organized two forums outside the university without any funding or any fees to the more than 100 attendees. The client was certainly impressed with the quality of the delivery of all consultancy reports and presentations and, more importantly, had little room to disagree with the final recommendations by these students on what the client should and should not do as the recommendations were predicated on evidence of what work and did not work in the buildup to and on the actual day of the events. This would not have been the case if the students had opted to deliver their consultancy using the conventional approach based on desktop research, as clients would then have the opportunity to dispute the recommendations. Specifically, the conventional approach would have allowed the client to question the credibility of the students (as consultants), as they have not completed their degree nor possess any significant working experience. In addition, the client would have been able to question the validity of the recommendations, as desktop research typically validates the issue at hand, but not the proposed solutions.
Many have questioned how this was possible and what was the benefit because there was no monetary exchange or profit made from these events. Indeed, this is similar to the situation of those in industry who often question why people should work more than they are actually paid for. It is safe to say that most successful people would agree that if you work more than what you are paid for, you will eventually be paid more than what you work for (Ann & Hidi, 2019; Groysberg et al., 2011; Twenge, 2010). In other words, you cannot have a “millionaire’s dream” with a minimum wage work ethic. In a similar vein, a shallow-minded view would have been that these students provided free labor when they organized these events for no payment. However, a deeper analysis would see this as an opportunity for students to build a portfolio that showcases the intellectual and emotional capabilities they have developed during their studies. Indeed, these capabilities have enabled them to identify and translate hidden opportunities (e.g., to connect companies and speakers with experience and resources that want to give back with young people and young professionals who want to listen and learn to grow and create impact) into results that many others, especially their critics, are unable to see and do. The acquisition of these employment-related knowledge and skill sets has also empowered these students to become career ready. More importantly, the impact of this learning experience was recognized across multiple means of unsolicited evidence, most notably through an industry award, a record high for teaching satisfaction—i.e., 9.2 of 10.0—from the university’s official teaching survey, and perhaps most remarkably, 100% graduate employability in their relevant fields within 6 months upon graduation for all students who have completed this unit under my care (see Table 1).
Upon my reflection of this experience, I find that the lessons that students can learn from the opportunities that arise from the reality- and result-based contemporary delivery of teaching and learning in final year project units as described here are clearly both endless and valuable. The secret to replicating this delivery, I feel, is predicated on an integration of pedagogies of what I call as the LABS pedagogy—i.e., Learning contracts, Authentic learning, Blended learning, Scaffolding—which supports and empowers students to take up challenges in the real world with confidence and competence:
Learning contracts, which can be psychological, spoken, or written, between educators and learners provide a sense of reciprocity in the expectations and support in teaching and learning. In particular, learning contracts were used to translate unit learning outcomes into expectations of teaching and learning commitments in the capstone unit. This was done through oral (i.e., face-to-face) and written (i.e., unit outline) communication. In addition, learning contracts were also used as a psychological mechanism to build trust in reciprocal teaching and learning relationship between the teacher and the student over time (e.g., if my students are willing to learn, I am willing to teach).
Authentic learning mirrors the issues and expectations of contemporary realities in the industry to create and demonstrate the relevance and value of learning activities for students’ future. In particular, the students in the capstone were required to examine real issues to inform the formulation and testing of potential solutions in practice before recommending what real clients should do or should not do. In doing so, the students were able to leverage on the contemporary capstone design to develop authentic recommendations for their clients (as opposed to the less authentic, conventional capstone design that required students to develop recommendations for clients based on desktop research).
Blended teaching and learning environments to create opportunities for scheduled and independent learning that caters to different learning styles and student backgrounds (e.g., opportunities to learn in the classroom and in the online environment through learning management systems, such as Blackboard, and social media, such as Facebook).
Scaffolding using formative assessments and learning resources to assist students to sharpen their hard and soft skills to empower them in their exploration and production of new insights and solutions for summative assessment tasks (e.g., drafts or proposals of sections of strategy, organized and personalized folders, 101 guides, concept slides, tutorial videos, social media, open consultation, and discussion).
In summary, I hope that this article will inspire greater reexamination of university teaching and learning to maintain its currency in preparing learners for their future careers and that the LABS pedagogy shared herein will find its way to the scholarly world for greater examination and debate.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
