Bedford Drop-In Session

Excellent drop-in session at Polhill on Wednesday. I particularly liked suggestions for the incorporation of entrepreneurial projects in the final year. And of potentially doing projects with other students from other disciplines at Bedford such as sport or dance eg how to market some dance classes.

Some valuable practicalities about the increased impact of missing a week through illness or any other reason when there is a practice week or other intensive week.

Very aware from this session that we must always be clear that practice-based education is not practice instead of academic rigour. We are a university and academic rigour is the point – or a large part of the point anyway.  Employers want academic rigour and practice. Practitioners don’t leave their intellects and rigour behind when they graduate. They use them to help address problems just as much as PhD students are employing rigour. It's just that the context is messier.

About the Author: Elizabeth Parkin
Elizabeth had a 25 year career in management before joining the University seven years ago as Manager for “Pod” Programmes. She also held the post of MBA Academic Director before moving on to becoming Head of Department for Management and Business Systems.

The Right Price for Learning

Right at the moment, if there is one thing I would like our students to learn in the first year of our new courses, it’s that dropping the price is not the automatic route to higher sales, let alone to higher profit. They just automatically think that lower prices are better prices.

I more or less cracked teaching pricing to Exec MBA’s but I haven’t cracked it for first year undergraduates. Theory certainly isn’t the best route in. I have a marketing lecture for first years coming up next month and have to think more imaginatively about it but this reflection is prompted by having shared some marking of first year assignments this morning with colleagues at Preston University in Ajman, Dubai. Good quantities of reasonable quality theory but low prices ruled here too.

I know it’s rather dull to come home from visiting a country for the first time and be struck more by the similarities than the differences but there we are.

About the Author: Elizabeth Parkin
Elizabeth had a 25 year career in management before joining the University seven years ago as Manager for “Pod” Programmes. She also held the post of MBA Academic Director before moving on to becoming Head of Department for Management and Business Systems.

Leaping on the Neck of Ideas

I stole the idea of a blog about the process from a presentation a colleague was doing.  Ever the magpie, I’m completely unashamed of the fact but will credit fellow magpie Eliot Lloyd here to avoid plagiarism.

On the same day we had to come up with a solution to the fact that it was impossible to share our ideas with colleagues and gain feedback in the way we planned:  A large open meeting simply wasn’t possible: no rooms available at times when a reasonable number of people could come.  So, as my office seemed the only available option at Luton, what could we do?  Small was the logical conclusion and drop-in sessions were born.  Different members of the core group have met with groups of two, four, five colleagues.  And it was quickly clear that this was in fact a better approach, more personal, more likely to generate a thoughtful response and application to specific courses.  Feedback on the process as well as content has been good so far.

The Undergraduate Portfolio Review

The University of Bedfordshire Business School is taking its entire undergraduate portfolio of courses to periodic review. We are looking back at how well our current courses are meeting student needs and designing courses which will put us at the forefront of practice-based business education. This blog is intended to record the reflections of those involved in the process and invites comments on our posts.

This is a major exercise for the Faculty and a major initiative in combining management practice, business academic theory and sound, innovative pedagogy. We want to blog about this for two reasons. Firstly it helps us reach and gain responses from a wide range of people. Secondly it is part of the record of what we are doing which we will be able to use later when we write up our method more formally for publication.

We have already worked on the review process for some weeks. Two parts are running in parallel. The review of the current provision has started now that the Annual Monitoring Reports for the undergraduate courses are coming in and the Student Voice focus groups have been held by the Students Union. At the same time, a core group of course leaders and a few others have been working on the future course design. We have thought about what we want to focus on in the short term and the kind of graduates we want to develop. We have also designed the broad structure of the third year. Now we are trying out these ideas in a series of drop-in sessions at Luton and Bedford as we also embark on designing the second year.

So, that is the catch-up on what we have been doing before we started to blog. Now there are some posts of notes made before we set up the blog then can continue in something approaching real time.

About the Author: Elizabeth Parkin
Elizabeth had a 25 year career in management before joining the University seven years ago as Manager for “Pod” Programmes. She also held the post of MBA Academic Director before moving on to becoming Head of Department for Management and Business Systems.

Eating Soup with a Fork: Teaching Entrepreneurship to Business Students

More and more people are getting aware of the benefits of “inventing a job rather than finding a job”. Across the world, universities and colleges are rushing to introduce entrepreneurship classes. This phenomenon has rekindled the age-old debate, whether entrepreneurship can be taught in business schools or one is better off learning it ‘by doing’?

The MBA Legacy

As if a day at the Olympics wasn’t exciting enough, I happened across a couple of MBA classmates there. It was as uplifting as being in the stadium.

There is a special quality to meeting up with people who went through an MBA experience together. It hardly takes any time at all to reclaim the mutual support and respect which ran through the year I spent studying. I did my MBA course because I needed to learn more about strategy and finance. Like most people, I came away with that and so much more including the self-understanding which underpins leadership.

Have you fostered someone’s aspirations today?

At the University of Bedfordshire we understand very well that some of our students come to our classrooms with narrow, constrained aspirations and one of our roles is to show what is possible for them. We all relish the moments when students realise what they can achieve. It’s a hard but crucial part of our role as higher education tutors to create those glimpses of possible futures but maybe it’s even harder for any of us to see the constraints to our own aspirations, both our individual and our collective aspirations.

Can we recognise when we have faded? When we have allowed ourselves to be beaten back? When we have consented to be constrained because it is too hard to fight the world all the time? I suggest we can’t usually do that until something happens to re-invigorate us and to realise how we had reduced ourselves. We too need the equivalent of a tutor to release us sometimes.