Abstract:

One of the big challenges today are innovative teaching concepts for business students in the area of digitalization. Students mostly know at the beginning of their study only basics of IT which is mainly related to their private (mobile) environment and not real business scenarios like data management, outsourcing and/or business process management.

At an university in Switzerland there exists currently a module for undergraduate business students which aims at students optimally preparing for the digital age. The assessment in this module is solely done via project work (teams consist of 4 up to 7 students). In order to avoid the often seen free rider effect, the team as a whole assigns the final grades to single team mates based on their individual performance.

The module is composed by different topics which are adapted to cover the fast changing IT. The topics of the last realization were:
• Business Knowledge Management: Knowledge Management in companies is about developing, sharing and developing knowledge.
• Collaboration and document management with SharePoint: Microsoft® SharePoint is one of the most well known platform for document- and workflow management in Switzerland.
• Business Process Management (BPM): Business Processes build the "backbone" of every modern organisation. The students get here acquainted with the full BPM live cycle, namely analysing, modelling, executing and optimizing business processes. Currently this topic is only superficially covered in the management science curriculum.
• Social human robot Interaction: The students develop here a showcase with the humanoid robot Nao/Pepper.

For each topic the teachers develop scenarios which slightly differ from team to team in order to avoid a copy&paste effect. Each team develops a concept for a scenario consisting of a project management outline, a summary of potential risks and a plan for implementation. These concepts are discussed with two teachers (four eyes principle) on a weekly basis. The teams are allowed to improve their draft concepts based on the given feedback before finally uploading them on Microsoft® SharePoint for grading. Specific attention is paid to checking the quality of the documents uploaded. Especially grammar, style, look & feel, referencing, trace-ability, consistency and rationale of arguments provided are relevant here.

The final grades are calculated by taking into account the single grades for the topics. The module is running in a two term mode and in each term the students must develop two concepts. Application for this module is mandatory, realisations are conducted with a maximum of 21 students.

In each realisation a different case is focused. Among examples for cases in the last terms are: customisable energy drinks, anti-lock breaking system for bicycles, HUD displays skiing helmets and integration of social robots in customer care.

Over the last terms we observed that the way this module is designed and taught is well accepted by the students (as opposed to classical ex-cathedra teaching). In discussions with teachers students confirmed that the module is more ambitious and stressful compared to classical exam-based lectures due to its agile and time-boxed nature. Testimonials from students tell us, that the effort to create high quality documents in a short period of time is demanding, but the specific design of the module which enables to gain necessary skills for the digitalization era is highly appreciated.

Keywords:

Management science, digitalization, coaching, self evaluation of students.