Abstract:

In recent years, educational methods called "active learning (AL)" have been attracting attention. In the field of management, where students need to learn the process of putting theory into practice experientially, AL methods have been proposed. To understand a pragmatic science like business management, students need to learn it through three sequential steps:
(1) acquiring knowledge,
(2) structuralizing knowledge, and
(3) generalizing knowledge.

However, it is difficult for undergraduate students who do not have business experience to learn steps (2) and (3).

Recently, many classes have been trying to take on AL to solve this problem in Japan. However, most of the proposed methods are based on the premise of face-to-face implementation. So, in the situation "with Corona virus (COVID-19)" where it is not easy to implement face-to-face group work with many people, it is desirable to implement this type of learning in a hybrid learning environment where online participants and offline participants are mixed, but there is no clear way to implement it effectively.

Therefore, we decided to conduct group work so that online students participate in regular face-to-face groups, and necessary materials are shared both offline and online, with an emphasis on fostering a sense of unity and satisfaction among participating students. In this way, it would be easier to make the most of the contents of the conventional group work and reduce the load on the instructors.

In this study, we conduct a trial of AL in the field of business administration in a hybrid environment, targeting "synchronization and empathy" that occur in organizational and group decision-making. We decided to use group work to draw out the active nature of the participants and obtain learning effects through "dialogue”. Since group work is conducted in a short period of time, we thought that an ice breaker was essential to improve the quality of the group work, so we decided to conduct an ice breaker before the group work. After the group work, we decided to give a lecture to explain what we learned in the group work.

The implementation method of our proposal is as follows:
Step 1: Ice-breaker
Step 2: Explanation and planning
Step 3: Group work 1
Step 4: Mutual inspection
Step 5: Explanation and planning
Step 6: Group work 2
Step 7: Mutual inspection
Step 8: Lecture

We used "google meet" as a meeting tool for online participants and a consensus game "Accident in snowy mountains" as a subject of the group work. We conducted an experimental class and demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposal. 86 university students (4-5 students x 18 groups, offline: 70 students, online: 16 students) conducted the group work in a hybrid learning environment, and we evaluated the effectiveness of the group work. In addition to evaluating the effectiveness of the group work, we also discussed the points to be considered when implementing this kind of learning in a hybrid learning environment.

Keywords:

Hybrid Learning Environment, Active Learning, Business Management Education, COVID-19.