The Use of Case Study Competitions to Prepare Students for the World of Work

As we continue into the new millennium, it is imperative that educational institutions equip graduates with the knowledge and skills that are increasingly needed and valued by business and industry. In this article, the authors argue that the case study approach and, specifically, case study competitions constitute an ideal pedagogical strategy for achieving this objective in an effective and efficient manner, with resulting benefits for both students and employers

Engaging marketing students: Student operated businesses in a simulated world

Engaged students are committed and more likely to continue their university studies. Subsequently, they are less resource intensive from a university’s perspective. This article details an experiential second-year marketing course that requires students to develop real products and services to sell on two organized market days. In the course, students participate as both consumers and marketers in a simulated world. The current article explores the effectiveness of this experiential assessment in terms of its ability to engage students. Comparing student engagement to a traditional lecture course and National Survey of Student Engagement benchmarks, the results suggest that the use of a simulated marketplace is capable of engaging students. Specifically, the assessment reported encourages more active learning and collaboration, is more academically challenging, and permits more student–faculty interaction than a traditional lecture-based course. The course structure outlined in this article permits the dynamics of a live marketing environment to be introduced into the classroom. The authors provide practical advice for educators seeking to design and implement engaging pedagogy

The Groupthink specification exercise

Abstract. Teaching students to read and write specifications is difficult. It is even more difficult to motivate specifications — to convince students of the value of specifications and make students eager to use them. The Groupthink specification exercise aims to fulfill all these goals. Groupthink is a fun group activity, in the style of a game show, that teaches students about teamwork, communication, and specifications. This exercise teaches students how difficult it is to write an effective specification (determining what needs to be specified, making the choices, and capturing those choices), techniques for getting them right, and criteria for evaluating them. It also gives students practice in doing so, in a fun environment that is conducive to learning. Specifications are used not as an end in themselves, but as a means to solving realistic problems that involve understanding system behavior. Students enjoy the activity, and it improves their ability to read and write specifications. The two-hour, low-prep activity is self-contained, scales from classes of ten to hundreds of students, and can be split into 2one-hoursessionsorintegratedintoanexistingcurriculum.Itisfreely available from the autho