Psychology of Creativity and Innovation in Engineering and Business Curriculum

The paper describes the development of a new course. Psychology of innovation, which is in the process of being approved as an elective course for four different majors: engineering, business, psychology, and art. The paper describes the course content, course educational objective, weekly assignments and projects. The new course is expected to be approved and implemented in the Fall 2021 Semester. The Course is expected to strengthen innovative potential of students from four different majors.

Wake up, managers, times have changed! A plea for degrowth pedagogy in business schools

The idea of endless economic growth is embedded in current economic teachings and in economic institutions. However, these teachings are being challenged by a corpus of studies which show that our economies are experiencing limits to growth. We must therefore work out how businesses can adapt to the post-growth era. This paper claims that there is an urgent need to introduce degrowth courses into the business curriculum to prepare future managers for the post-growth era. One way of doing this is to develop a specific degrowth pedagogy rooted in critical pedagogy. The author outlines the degrowth paradigm and introduces the current challenges of business education. Critical pedagogy provides the teacher with the necessary skills for questioning the relevance of the infinite growth paradigm on a finite planet. The paper reveals the transformational potential of degrowth pedagogy in business education.

Case Study in Project Management: A Vehicle for Business Curriculum Integration

This case can be team-taught to combine the different elements of business education taught by individual faculty within a course in Project Management, as a partial, half credit module within a business curriculum. This case study is written to address the feedback from prospective employers that the fresh recruits are reticent and need a long period of “internship / training/ mentoring” before they are ready to be a part of the company’s internal team. The case depicting a real company undergoing substantial changes provides the students with opportunities to gain the analytical skills developed in the study of various business disciplines, while providing the opportunity for discussion and illustration of real-life scenarios, constraints, and roadblocks. Moreover, students practice team development and process efficiencies. Instructors will teach how marketing, sales, and procurement functions impact the accounting and finance components of the project so the project scope is managed within the resources, schedule, and budget.

Employability Skills of Business Graduates in Job Markets of Bangladesh: Investigating Weaknesses and Suggesting Improvements

Job seekers have to face intense competition to get the expected job in the current job market of Bangladesh. A plethora of job seekers especially business graduates are coming to the job markets having MBA degrees but fails or takes longer time to get expected jobs since employability skills are the prime requirement for every contemporary organization. The study aims to investigate the weaknesses in the employability skills of business graduates in Bangladesh and suggest some effective measures to curtail those weaknesses. A self-administered survey instrument developed, some items deleted after analysis, and some items revised to get a concrete one. This questionnaire sent to 300 students who already graduated with an MBA degree and are trying to get expected jobs. Among them, 280 usable responses collected and used as the sample in this study. The ranking method and proportion analysis used for analyzing the collected data. The findings revealed that the business graduates of Bangladesh possessed significant lacking employability skills as inadequate team-working skills, lack of communication and interpersonal skills, unable to learn and adapt to the environment, lack of negotiation skills, and shortage of organizing skills. Moreover, this study suggested some measures like providing proper training, arranging case competitions and job fairs, the mitigating gap between the schooling system and market demands, re-arranging the business curriculum, and so on for taking consideration by concerned authorities to solve the identified weaknesses.

Integrating Service Learning Into Higher Education Curriculum

This study aims to assess the effectiveness of integrating service learning into the business curriculum of a higher education provider to enhance learners' competencies and reflective learning. Founded on the educational theories of constructivism and social learning, this research consolidates and takes research forward in the understanding of how transforming the business curriculum by integrating service learning through teacher-learner partnerships enhances a students' ability for reflective learning. Using a self-administered questionnaire-based survey with 256 respondents, the data were analysed using variance based PLS-SEM to reveal that service learning had a significant positive influence on reflective learning and on student competency development. The results indicate the positive impact that team-based service learning through teacher-learner partnerships had on the learners' experience. These findings offer some interesting insight for educators, researchers, and policy makers as a means to enhance the learning experience of students in tertiary education in Malaysia.