Bert Jarreau, Collegiate Professor, MBA Program, School of Business, University of Maryland Global Campus, Europe Division | bert.jarreau@umgc.edu

Kathy So, Collegiate Associate Professor, MBA Program, School of Business, University of Maryland Global Campus, Europe Division | kathy.so1@umgc.edu

     As collegiate professors that teach MBA classes throughout Europe, we have had to respond to novel challenges because of the COVID-19 pandemic by employing new or modified teaching approaches. We describe the circumstances brought on by the pandemic that propelled us to experiment with new techniques, discuss the results of our experimentation, and share what we plan to build upon from our lessons learned going forward.

What? Pre-Pandemic Magic

     University of Maryland Global Campus (UMGC) MBA classes in Europe are 11-week long, hybrid classes with three complete weekend residencies per class (total face-to-face meeting time of 48 hours per class). Prior to April 2020, these residencies were held in person at military installations across Europe. Since then, however, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, remote Zoom sessions have replaced these in-person weekend residencies. These MBA courses apply the project-based learning format, where students learn-by-doing through engaging in solving and dealing with real-world challenges and problems. Classes consist of projects that students complete to demonstrate mastery of the stated competencies.

     Our teaching and learning environment pre-pandemic at the military education centers was “magical.” Our students are all military-affiliated (current and former military members and their families). Collectively, they lead by example, possess tremendous experiences, have outstanding work ethics, and demonstrate “can-do” attitudes. The most experienced students would rise to the occasion by becoming class leaders in their first MBA class and continue as class leaders with the existing cohorts for the remaining MBA classes. They demonstrated leadership by coming prepared to class, leading discussions, sharing relevant experiences, and serving as role models for their classmates.

     Before teaching remotely using Zoom, we effectively used the flipped learning model to complete student readings and research before attending the weekend residencies. The residencies provided a dynamic, interactive learning environment where we guided the students to reinforce their learning as they applied the concepts. Knowing that they had to be ready to perform in person, most students would come prepared at these residencies. Teaching in such an environment enabled us to serve as coaches and mentors truly.

So What? Why Experiment?

     We found that since teaching remotely using Zoom, our students have been less prepared. Students have not felt the same pressure to engage and perform as before. In addition, we found that those students that began their MBA program in-person tended to be more prepared for their residencies when UMGC transitioned to Zoom than those that started their MBA program remotely. We believe the pressure of meeting in person and the examples displayed by the classroom student leaders established the culture and standard to raise everyone’s performance level. This in-person culture has been difficult to emulate in the virtual environment. Over the past five semesters, while teaching remotely, we have experimented with recreating the best learning environment and active engagement before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Experiments

Legal and Ethical Environment of Business Project

     One of the major challenges to teaching in an on-line platform like Zoom is the lack of personal interaction and dialogue with the students (Filho et al., 2021). This is also a challenge in the face-to-face classrooms, but the added dimension of interacting through a screen, heightens this challenge. Most students in the MBA program are unfamiliar with legal concepts and ethical theories at the start of this class; however, by the end of the MBA 630 class, students have grasped many key legal and ethical concepts. So, at the end of the business ethics and legal class (MBA 630 Leading in the Multicultural Global Environment), students are challenged with a final review of the materials learned during the term.

     Using games in the classroom to increase motivation and engagement is not a new idea in pedagogy or andragogy (Barber, 2021). One review game that was utilized pre-COVID-19 in MBA 630 was JeopardyLabs (https://jeopardylabs.com), which allows the instructor to create a Jeopardy style game. The game was then played in teams, which also allowed for building teamwork skills and collaboration. Unfortunately, this format does not work well on Zoom with more than a handful of students due to the limitation of players allowed in the game. And implementing this format on Zoom to be played in teams would be almost impossible. Fortunately, however, we discovered another online resource called Kahoot! (https://kahoot.com) to create a game-style interactive activity. The Kahoot! format allows individualized trivia-type practice, where educators can create an interactive assessment to determine students’ grasp of key concepts. Like playing jeopardy, the trivia game allows for gamification in our learning environment.

     In the face-to-face format, JeopardyLabs will likely be used again. The jeopardy game incorporates team building and the format functions much better than Kahoot! for in-person interaction. However, during our time on Zoom, the trivia-game has been a good replacement as an engaging and interactive tool for our classroom.

Digital Analytics Project

     Our digital analytics project in MBA 640 Innovation Through Marketing and Technology requires the students to complete extensive class readings on digital analytics and participate in four online discussions in our marketing class. Then the students analyze and answer ten questions regarding a company’s eCommerce site to assess the traffic volume, referrals, clickstreams, online reach data, and sales to optimize website usage. To perform this, we have our students complete a Google Analytics (GA) tutorial (Google Analytics Academy, n.d.) and perform the required analysis using Google’s demo account (GA demo account, n.d.) that contains several years of data from the Google Merchandise Store.

     We instruct our students to complete this tutorial and attempt to get to the appropriate GA report to answer each question before meeting for their second-weekend residency. Our goal is not to make these students GA experts but to use their analytical and critical thinking skills to analyze and answer these ten questions effectively. We then lead an interactive discussion in the second-weekend residency, where we have the students come up with the correct GA reports to analyze each question. This exercise enables the students to critically examine these reports on their own to answer the questions, ensuring they analyze the correct data.

     During these face-to-face classes, our students almost always were prepared to address this digital analytics project during their second-weekend residency. Conversely, in our remote courses, they have rarely come prepared. When they come unprepared, we express disappointment because they will not maximize their learning for this project. We then redirect the last two hours of our Saturday session to complete the tutorial and identify the correct GA reports to address each question. We inform them that if they do not come prepared on Sunday, we will cancel this exercise, and they get to complete this project on their own time. They always come prepared on Sunday, and we get energetic participation from our students. Many of them work late into the evening on Saturday to prepare for this exercise, as evidenced by the e-mails and chat requests we receive from them asking questions. Our students continually identify their GA work as the highlight of their weekend.

     Students have shifted their former preparatory efforts to the Zoom residencies instead of a classic flipped mode where they prepared in advance asynchronously and came ready for live synchronous sessions. As a result, the distinction between offline, asynchronous, flipped work, and in-person face-to-face residencies, compared to online flipped work and Zoom-based residences, is now blurred. Zoom, it appears, is considered by more students as flipped prep work activity instead of live discussion work.

Now What? Lessons Learned

     We have learned to be more adaptive with our teaching techniques to better engage our students in the on-line format using Zoom and other resources. The silver lining to the pandemic has been the ability of our UMGC Europe community to become more engaged with one another to experience different teaching techniques, some of which we can carry forward to when we return to the physical classrooms. Going forward, the adult teaching environment is evolving, and we must learn to continue to improve our techniques and not dwell too much in the past of our pre-pandemic classrooms.

References

Barber, C. S. (2021). When students are players: Toward a theory of student-centric edu-gamification systems. Journal of Information Systems Education, 32(1), 53-64. https://jise.org/Volume32/n1/JISE2021v32n1pp53-64.html

Filho, W. L., Price, E., Wall, T., Shiel, C., Azeiteiro, U. M., Mifsud, M., Brandli, L., Farinha, C. S., Caeiro, S., Salvia, A. L., Vasconcelos, C. R., de Sousa, L. O., Pace, P., Doni, F., Avila, L. V., Fritzen, B., & LeVasseur, T. J. (2021). COVID-19: The impact of a global crisis on sustainable development teaching. Environment, Development and Sustainability 23, 11257-11278. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-020-01107-z

Google Analytics Academy. (n.d.). Google Analytics for beginners. Retrieved March 13, 2022 from https://analytics.google.com/analytics/academy/course/6

Google Analytics Help (n.d.). Demo account. (n.d.). Retrieved March 13, 2022 from https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6367342?hl=en&ref_topic=10388829#zippy=%2Cin-this-article