Not business as usual: experimenting with teaching business

During COVID-19 lockdowns, Program Coordinator Laura Yeomans used the move to online teaching as a chance to reconsider how to teach remedial massage students about small business operations. By creating an online resource book, using SharePoint to add a real-life business element and incorporating a pseudo student into the mix, Laura was able to increase student engagement, collaboration and learning.

Highlights:

Creating an online resource book allows students to read important information in their own time and leaves in-class time for important discussions.
Incorporating a pseudo-student journey into the course helped contextualise content for students.
Work integrated learning was incorporated by getting students to collaborate via SharePoint.
Using SharePoint for student discussions meant that in-class discussions could be tailored around what students were already talking about.

For Program Coordinator Laura Yeomans “just getting away from PowerPoint” was her main requirement when looking at how she could redesign her course Monitor and manage small business operations for remedial massage students. The course teaches students about the basic mechanics of running small business using the RMIT Health Clinic as it’s basis.

With the help of a live-in learning designer, Laura was able to implement a new teaching framework that incorporated real-world industry experience, fostered student engagement, created valuable in-class discussions and overall a more engaging learning experience for students.

Creating an online resource book

“Three hours of PowerPoint in Collaborate Ultra is not what a student wants,” said Laura.

Moving away from a PowerPoint heavy content delivery towards something more interactive was a key change she wanted to make. Instead, the content of the PowerPoint slides became the foundation for an online resource book that served as a single source of truth for the course content. Students were encouraged to read and refer back to the resource in their own time so that class time could be dedicated to discussions.

A screenshot of a resource book used in the monitor and manage small business course. This page talks about Risk Management Matrix.

Online resource books were provided to students online via Canvas and Sharepoint so that students could refer to the information in their own time and at their own pace.

For Laura, this approach was a more valuable way for students to engage with learning materials. It aims to strengthen students’ ability to learn on their own and means in-class time can be devoted to expanding on students’ understanding of core content.

Contextualising the content

Finding ways to contexualise course content helps bridge the gap between the theoretical and the practical. For Laura, this was achieved by incorporating a fictional student and their journey working in a fictional remedial massage clinic into the course. The student’s journey served as continuous case study throughout each week of the course and experienced many of the real-life circumstances remedial massage therapists would face working in a small business.

Laura explained that the intention behind this was making it real for students, provided a jump off point for in-class discussions and provided an unique way to give feedback to students by directing them back to specific parts of the fictional student journey.

Incorporating WIL in the classroom

Using SharePoint as the main point of communication was a way for Laura to incorporate work integrated learning in the classroom setting. Laura really wanted to take students out of the artificial learning environment of Canvas and into a more “realistic real-world setting of communicating via SharePoint” – one of the business systems used in industry including at the RMIT clinic.

Using SharePoint as the main learning platform meant that students got a real-life experience of communicating while running a business. Laura often used the platform to communicate with students as if she were the manager of a clinic.

“It was a great way of them to step out of the casualness of tools like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and step into what it’s like in a real business. This is how we behave. This is the language we use.”

While Canvas was still used to host study materials, SharePoint was where Laura encouraged students to do all their collaborating. Students were able to use SharePoint like a discussion board to post about work that happened in class, share ideas, research and sources with the rest of the cohort.

“It was a great way to create conversation. The engagement among students was huge,” said Laura. “That’s really what we were aiming for.”

The Monitor and Manage small business operations Sharepoint site includes Activity, documents, and news sections

The Monitor and Manage small business operations Sharepoint site encourages students to interact with each other through news, document uploads and recent activity.

It also served as a way for students to develop the content for the course; being able to see what students were discussing and the resources they were sharing meant Laura was able to tailor in-class discussions and questions to be more contextualised around what students were already discussing amongst themselves.

The next phase of the experiment will be building on what worked well. She firmly believes in the pedagogy behind the resource book and is looking to incorporate it into her other teaching courses. Due to the great student engagement with the SharePoint site, she is reflecting on how she can use it in other units as well.

She encourages other educators to experiment where they can by looking at what RMIT has to offer in terms of software, technology and equipment, consider how to make it work for their course, and reflect on what worked and didn’t work.

While Laura admitted that the teaching approach she took it was “a bit experimental”, she firmly believes that creating a clear definition for what real business and real world looks like results in the best learning outcome for the students.

Story by: Kelsie Kruse

06 January 2022

Return to Next in Teaching

06 January 2022

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