Abstract:

In the course of Management for graduate students in the 4th year of study at Faculty of Economics and Management CULS in Prague we teach the general principles and basic fields of management via blended and experiential learning. During this course students are given 10 tasks to be credited. The course uses online learning management system (Moodle platform) and records the times of tasks' uploads. Therefore we are able to find out inconsistency in the terms in which students uploaded their tasks. Part of tasks' uploads was immediate, the most of students were timely but some students were almost delayed or just delayed. We decided to analyse this situation.

The already existing research about students' delays in classwork brings interesting outputs. McElroy and Lubich (2013:85) said that ‘delay in the performance and/or submission of classwork has long been associated with poor outcomes on the grades earned on that work’. Warnock et al (2012) found that students who started to fulfill tasks earlier tend to have better outcomes. McElroy and Lubich (2013) confirmed and extended these results founding the strong relation between the date of the first posting in the classroom and grade earned in the class (they used Learning Management System for teaching the class). The importance of students' delays in classwork stress (Elvers, Polzella, and Graetz, 2003) as the tool for an early identification of which students are at risk of not completing the course.

There were 81 men and 265 women in the course. During workshops we put students through experiential learning to the model situations which are usual to managers and we link experiences they obtained with theory through lectures. In the summer academic semester 2013/2014 (12 weeks) we started to observe students behaviour in the course from the manager's point of view. The most important idea was to find out how do they behave in terms of managerial competencies, roles or functions. Part of this observation also led to focus on students' procrastination and especially action part of procrastination: delays of students' submissions.

During the semester 346 students had to fulfil 10 tasks to be credited. Tasks were focused on the students' self-development and there were two categories of tasks:
(i) self-diagnostic's tasks and
(ii) feedbacks' tasks.

The fulfilled tasks are always uploaded by students to the learning management system, so the history of submission is known in each case. The study is divided into two parts. In the first part students were observed in fulfilling the tasks. We always marked the term the task was given to students and the period between this term and the term of the task upload was evaluated. Each task had its own characteristics, as type of task, estimated severity of the task, time required to complete the task, task's announcement, exact deadline, reminded task or not, etc. In the second part of pilot study the students filled in the short survey about their habits and techniques they use for time management. The results of this part of research will be used in discussion as subjective views of students about themselves in the issue of delays of students' submissions and we compare them with the facts we will be able to measure through LMS Moodle (students submissions' behaviour).

The aim of the research is to determine the rate to which students delay their submissions and to find out how teachers may influence this rate among students.

Keywords:

Academic procrastination, business faculty, time management, students, delay.