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Case study: Developing the ‘Humanity, Economics & Management’ module

School of Business and Society
John Issitt

John Issitt provides an overview of his approach to developing the VLE site for the ‘Humanity, Economics & Management’ module, outlining the pedagogical approaches that underpinned the design of the module and the structure of the site. He describes the framework for weekly activities within the module involving:

  • Online recordings introducing key ideas, and made available alongside the scripts.

  • Supporting materials and links to ‘leads’ for further study.

  • Weekly two hour workshops with activities related to each theme

  • Weekly one-hour ‘lectures’ packaged to students as ‘performances, mini lectures and debates’ and intending to stimulate interest in the subject.

Watch their presentation:

Developing the ‘Humanity, Economics & Management’ module (Panopto viewer) (6 mins 56 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

I suppose that, I feel kind of like I'm in the wrong place. Really. And I'm not prepared a presentation and so on. And also, much of the assumptions, I think, behind the applications of IT into higher education. I'm sort of - I'm a classic resistor. You know, I sort of put up with it rather than embrace it. So you might sort of take my words with that. With that in mind. I could defend that and explain explain why I think what I do, but probably not the place to do it here. So all I'm doing is telling you what I've done with it and not being somebody who is necessarily, you know, engaged in a mission about VLEs or Ultras or anything. So we've got to do so we've got to do it. So what I've done is, because we've semesterised, I had to sort of rejig and rebuild and make my own a module Year 1 module used to be called managing the business environment. I've now called it humanity economics and management.

So it's a sort of a general module that goes across three program lines and is a general... It's about perspective, it's about developing perspective, and it carries with it my quite distinct pedagogical and epistemological assumptions about what we're doing in teaching and learning. So I'm nurturing skills, a quick information retrieval and evaluation use. I enter the student into what we are doing and nurture the student as an independent thinker. Right from the very beginning, they are bringing something to the table. So the assumptions right from the beginning are that they are contributors, not just simply receivers in the enterprise. So what I do is I curate the knowledge or I create the various subjects that we're doing of one the nature of humanity, perspectives on economics, difficulties of of management and they are broken down into each week, different subjects, we have week long bits. I don't give long readings. I don't use textbooks. Don't give long lectures. I serve up the week in a particular way. I give them an account of the issue, curate it. I do it online. I learned from the COVID experience, that the main content is is delivered via very short videos associated with video scripts. So they have all the original scripts, they can get all my stuff. And actually that allows people just to simply learn that way if that's what they choose. In fact 327 on the things, quite a lot of people do that.

And I use what are called lectures as ways of entertainment, presentation, different forms of theatre. And I did a quite nice one with using Menti to create a narrative over the nature of human ignorance and greed over 100 years since the the Wall Street crash and today. So I give them some leads, I curate it, but I expect them to take their ideas and go forward and do their own research. I constantly want them to explore themselves, and I'm nurturing skills in very quickly trying to get information and developing the confidence and handling the sometimes quite complex and important ideas that I that I give them. Most buy into it, as far as I can tell. Generally speaking, the feedback is good.

I use it - the interface by way of telling them precisely what I'm doing all the time. The assessment is available right from the minute go, so they can structure their learning according to the assessment and how they do it if that's what they choose. I anticipate a range of different needs within the student body, and I suppose I've designed what I've done in anticipation of that so more people can choose what they do. Obviously you can't please everybody.

What else was I was going to say? Well, I think I probably done what I needed to do. I didn't find the VLE ultra particularly difficult once I got hold of the way the sort of organisation structure of it and its limitations. That tripped me up a few times, but I didn't find it particularly difficult. I didn't find it much better than the previous one. But once I got around, I was able to put it out pretty quickly and I'd use it for all sorts of ways and I kind of, wherever I can, I use a dynamic approach in which I'll get my GTAs to contribute in what we do in our whole group workshop classes.

One of the most important things, I think, is that when I was working through this, resisting most of the way, John Brown, who was so helpful in discussing it. So I found the discussion process of saying, well, can I do this? Can I do that? was very creatively useful in ass much as I was able to do things I didn't think I could do before - or that I could, that I could try. Right. So my process really is demystifying the issues, making it as simple as possibly I can, and serving it up with what I call, what I think of being appropriate respect for the learner. To that extent, it's not been a difficult thing. It's not been a particularly revolutionary thing. But I've managed to do it. And as far as I can see so far, I've got no complaints.