Abstract:

In the past decade the role of the university teacher has changed in many ways, and today there are many stakeholders in a university course. Government educational bodies, university leadership, administration, fellow teachers, students, and society at large, all have expectations on how the teaching should be organised and executed. Although the stakeholders often have different expectations, they do share at least two: That a university teacher should repeatedly strive for increased quality in teaching, and that technology should be utilised to assist and be a major part of the learning process. In 2014 we were assigned the task to teach a large mandatory class (approximately 350-400 students) in business ethics, which until then had been given in what we call a “traditional” teaching mode (lectures, a few written assignments followed by a multiple-choice exam). After several years of redesigning the course, the teaching approach is now much more diverse with a mix of lectures, seminars and videos (blended learning). The students are given written assignments both individually and in groups, and in order to facilitate and increase the students’ communication skills, we have introduced two additional modules, one in academic writing and one in oral communication. In this paper, we describe, present and discuss our experiences with improving and developing the course design and teaching in business ethics. In the process of redesigning the course, student feedback through end-of-term evaluations, has provided useful input.

More specifically, we address three main questions:
(1) What is our motivation for course innovation and development?
(2) Why the blended learning approach?
(3) What are our experiences from five years with course innovations based on student feedback among other factors?

Keywords:

Blended learning, Case study, Business ethics, Business education, Innovation, Course design, Higher education.