Abstract:

One of the big challenges today are innovative teaching concepts for business students in the area of digitalization. At the beginning of their study, students mostly know only basics of IT mainly related to their private (mobile) environment and not real business scenarios such as business process management or workflow management.
The objective of this paper is to outline how students invest relevant parts into the final grade. Students invest more time into challenging group works that count less than into the final examination that counts more. It is also reflected in the evaluation that working on complex group work is the most exciting part within an innovative teaching concept for business students in the area of business process and project management.

At a university in Switzerland, most of the teaching for business students is done in a classical ex-cathedra set-up. A module for undergraduate business students that aims at business process and project management was developed based on the criteria of evidence-based good university teaching. A team of 12 lecturers teaches the module in a way, so that business process and project management can be taught within one scenario in the same way by all lecturers. The university is distributed between three different locations in Switzerland. The 12 classes were taught (German 9, English 3) with the same (translated) case study and exercise and the same exam at Bloom’s Taxonomy level “Evaluate” at the end.

The methodology of the new module is based on the one hand on case study teaching and on the other hand on the concept of a flipped classroom. For that a case study was developed in which a start-up company is described, that wants to develop a new crowdsourcing process within a project. The case study was developed out of concrete experiences of a start-up company.

For 12 weeks, the students had to familiarize with the theory on the topics business process management and project management. Within the class the students had to exercise in groups based on the preparation tasks and exercises that were developed by business process and project management professionals. The lecturers coached the different groups during the exercise.

During the semester the students were able to work on two different assignments (complex group works). These assignments related to the development of a process based on BMPN 2.0 (Business Process Model and Notation, an internationally used modelling language for business process modelling) and an implementation of parts of their process within a workflow engine. Creating workflows is a big challenge, because it is the first time for the students that they had to digitize something themselves. The assignments count 30% of the final grade.

Over the last term we observed that the way this module is designed and taught is well accepted by many (but not all) students (as opposed to classical ex-cathedra teaching).

This paper will also show what students prefer to invest their time in and what the outcome is in terms of grade/quality of work. In particular, we will show that students spend more time on complex group work, which counts less (30%), than on preparing for the exam, which counts for 70%. Similarly, the quality of group work is significantly better than that of the exam.

Keywords:

Digitalization, group work, process management, process modeling, workflow management, workflow, camunda.