Case study: Using the journal tool and discussion groups on the ‘Strategic planning: a journey’ module

School of Business and Society
Jonathan Fanning

Jonathan Fanning shares his experiences of using the journal, groups and discussion board tools to support students on a 20 credit postgraduate module. The module involves interaction within and between up to 18 small groups to support a strategic simulation activity known as ‘the game’. Students take on roles within their teams and have to make decisions on what ‘moves’ they should make and what strategies they should deploy when interacting with other groups.

The discussion boards allow students to share ideas, discuss and dynamically change their plans, and seek feedback, whilst also allowing staff to monitor learning and engagement. Students frequently shared supporting files, showing work in progress or complete versions of work, and they also tended to share pictures and use other methods of showing their personalities through the activities.

Students also used the journal tool for reflective diaries which were used for both formative and summative purposes. Staff experienced challenges in monitoring and providing feedback given the size and number of student journals, but use of dictation tools supported greater efficiency and feedback volume. Jonathan was clear on the value of gaining insights into the process of development and learning compared to reliance on the end products alone. He noted that student engagement with the module was high and that feedback was positive.

Watch their presentation:

Using the journal tool and discussion groups on the ‘Strategic planning: a journey’ module (Panopto viewer) (6 mins 42 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

I won't spend a lot of time talking about the module as I only have a few minutes, but I will briefly state the name of the module is 'Strategic planning: A journey' and it's a 20-credit module in the second semester taught to postgraduate students. It used to be quite a small module, about 25 students on it, but over the years it's increased. And last year it was 66, slightly larger than its peak of circa 90. This has made it much more difficult for the last few years to manage the core element of strategic simulation, known as the game. Now, for example, we have three seminars and three games. Before we used to have one seminar which meant one game. Obviously, this has meant that we need to automate a lot more, and it's far more complicated to keep track of students' ongoing work. And for this we need to... to use more tools that allow things to be recorded and analysed and therefore the arrival of Ultra for online marking, for group work, for discussion group for communicating and keeping this all together has proved really useful.

Equally. I won't spend a lot of time describing the game, but I will give you a little bit of background because I think it's important to understand why it's quite complicated and why they use the groups function, the journals and the discussion boards, etc. It's very useful. The game is played by up to six teams of 4 or 5 students each, so that can be up to 18 teams to manage each year. Each team is playing a government subcommittee for international Affairs. And needs to interact with the other teams, and that has to be controlled and monitored. But each member of the team has a specific role, such as chair, finance minister, defence minister, etc. so their interactions need to be monitored. The game has a competitive and a cooperative element. This is known as coopetition. It requires students to interact with the other teams to be successful, and so is relevant to the approach we use on the module.

Students' backgrounds are they're either from the public sector or they're interested in joining the public sector or the non-profit sector. So it's very different environment and business strategy. Students are both pre and post experience, so not all are young people happy and up-to-date with technology. Most are actually in their 30s and 40s and some are older than me. The group of sponsored South Korean civil servants that are there every year can be very conservative when it comes to technology in particular.

For the purpose of this module, we use four different tools. We use discussion boards, we use journals, and we use groups which I'm going to talk about - those three are the ones I'm going to talk about today. We also use quizzes a lot, but I'm not going to go into depth on those.

Specifically for groups, there are two types of groups. We have to set up an Ultra group for each seminar, and within each we have subgroups of four or five teams. We use the phrase ‘teams’, not groups. The team names are not very important, but just give an idea for the environment. They are Latin collective, Ancient Civilisation, North United, New Republic and Communist collective in the year I'm talking about. On this side is an example of how the students use discussion groups. To start they upload their moves and give ideas, and then they can interact with further explanation from other group members giving interaction online, which we can monitor and giving much more depth to the group. They can then upload various files here that are useful to them. So upload the data for their move to a spreadsheet that calculates results. And you also see where the GTAs give feedback and give ideas and give help on that's ongoing. And they also sometimes link copies of actual classwork. They sometimes put up report-ready work as well, but we also encourage them to put up incomplete version showing progress, and therefore we can monitor how they are learning and the process that they're undertaking.

You can also see examples of students interacting with one another, discussing moves in play to one another, making dynamic and live changes. One thing I liked was the fact that they often put up little things, like pictures of themselves, that showed the way they wanted to get involved and showcase their personalities, even though they were using online discussion groups. I think that really added to the experience of students and of staff. Here, we show some more images and you can see a variety of content. In this case there's annotation of a wipe clean map it's just a piece of work they've done in class, they've drawn it, they can wipe it clean, they can take photographs, nobody'll keep copies of it. And this shows you can measure coming to class. Also alongside this we have a cleaned-up report board as a submission where students can showcase off their presentation skills beyond merely doing a powerpoint in class, real presentation skills, writing things that are supposed to be understandable, and this more proof of process and progress. As you can see, there are a lot of groups to monitor here on this module. It wasn't just a few.

Students keep reflective journals, which they receive feedback as a formative measure and a final mark with individual feedback. These diaries include often full academic references, use of theories and models, and the very best developments of their own, they can develop their own theories and models. One problem here is keeping up with the sheer number of diaries that needed commentary on the system made it difficult to keep a track of, which had some feedback on it, which had none, because they kept updating as students added work. The use of the dictation tool vastly increased the speed of feedback and the quality was not hugely reduced, although there were a few more typos that were missed. Honestly, the students stopped making this an issue, though. Being honest with them was really important. Here we have two further uploads - one of classwork and then the final module strategy perfectly designed. You see the contradiction here between perfect process and final output. We also have another example here, and what I feel is important the interactive student work is preserved even in the tools. You can see in the first example here, how they've pasted their classroom work in, and then pasted an example too of their cleaning up of the work for their final version. I believe this is a must better demonstration of learning than simply producing the perfect assessment version in the report. We can actually use this online tool to see them developing their ideas.

Like I said before, I've also used auto-marked quizzes a lot, which gives instant feedback on students’ knowledge, so it is important, but the rest was about reflection, advanced academic skills and progression. So I'm not going to talk here because I don't think this is very special to the module.

I think student feedback is interesting and I conclude with this one because "your module is frightening and confusing, but in a good way." gives some idea of the feelings the students have going through it. Uh, this one is a particularly memorable piece of feedback. I haven't read had a chance to go through a great deal else yet. Uh, I'd also say there was a Friday evening seminar that was meant to finish at 6.30, but the students were still often going at 7.15 when I left, so engagement was very high on this module. If you have any questions then please put them in the comments below this video if that is available. But if not, then please do feel free to email me at Jonathan dot fanning at York dot ac dot UK.