Abstract:

Increasingly, teaching has taken more forms than ever before. This is partly a consequence of the pandemic which forced teachers to restructure their courses for the online environment, which both students and teachers have become accustomed to. Another factor that has an impact is that the form of jobs required in the future is increasingly unpredictable, among others due to technical revolution, most recently the impact of artificial intelligence (AI). These issues are having a profound impact on what to emphasise in curriculum and how to approach teaching. There is furthermore a demand for offering a broader range of courses than before to meet requirements for variety and unpredictability of future jobs. These changes can result in a lower number of students registered for individual courses, particularly those that are highly specialized. This, as well as stringent financial constraints in some universities, has to some extent resulted in the need for students to study more on his/her own. This research elaborates on a so called structured reading course which was designed to meet the need to offer a course for only very few students as a result of some of the challenges referred to above.

The reading course was designed in two modules per week during a 7 week period. One of the concerns was on how to keep students engaged and participating regularly throughout the course, having to study on their own. The approach applied in order to compensate for this challenge, the course was based on a number of short readiness assurance assignments which the students completed regularly, generally 3 – 4 assignments per week. There were two types of assignments; general and theoretical, in which students were asked to match a real life example to the theory assigned for each module of the course and a case study assignment in which the students were asked to answer a question related to the case and connect their recommendations to the respective theory covered in the module. Additionally, there were two group assignments, one theoretical and one in which they needed to match innovation processes of a real life organization to theory. This stimulated both academic learning and application of the theory, both individually and together. The course was then completed with an oral exam. Canvas offered an opportunity to follow up the activeness of students, both the readiness assurance assignments and simply checking regularly on the active use of student resources.

The result of this experience was in fact very promising. Students were supposed to complete 80% of the readiness assurance assignments, but they in fact completed them up to 117%. Among the reasons were the grading, which was based on the best assignments thus stimulating high participation in order to get a high grade. Another reason was simply that the students generally felt the readiness assurance assignments were helpful for their learning. The oral exam finally confirmed that all the students had a reasonable knowledge of the topics covered in the course.

A limitation of this exercise is that it is only based on one experience and one structure for the reading course.

Keywords:

Reading course, innovation in teaching, assignments, course structure.