Ruth Jebe and Shelle Poole, assistant professors in the Department of Management, are working to create a framework for teaching in a deeply experiential way.
“We know that adults learn by doing and we want to have our classrooms be laboratories for real business immersion, a safe space where students work within a constructed business environment,” Poole explains.
Jebe and Poole have both used immersive use cases in their classrooms that are based on real-world experience and they want to take it further —Â a whole semester of immersion where from day one, students are coming to work for organization X. Instead of a syllabus, they will receive an employee manual and onboarding into the new organization. From there, course content would be taught through one experience after another.
“We plan to pilot the framework in a strategy class and a law class,” says Jebe, “but one of our goals for the project is to create a framework that can be used in teaching any functional area, from finance to IT to human resource management.”
The project name they are considering is Business: Total immersion.
Funding is coming from the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) and the Provost Office.
“This is something I’m very excited about,” says Susan Shadle, director of CTL. “We know that active, engaged teaching is good for student learning and I look forward to the results of this work.”