Group Admins
Description
Team work, collaboration and relationship building are highly valued graduate attributes amongst Management students and proficient use of IT skills is also identified as a key employability requirement (CBI, 2011).
Students on a large 2nd year UG Business Planning module work in teams to collaboratively produce a business plan as a major part of their sumative assessment. While effective communication and collaboration methods between teams on campus has been an issue in the past, this becomes more challenging over vacation periods before submission deadlines, particularly when team members are frequently in different countries.
This short presentation will report on the transferrable enabling approaches which were used to support students to make group choices regarding the use of technology within their collaborative working practices.
The presentation will also summarise findings from mid-point and end of module surveys and focus groups exploring changes in students’ use of, and perceptions towards technology throughout the collaborative process. Initial results collected highlight the range of technologies used by students in their group work and the value placed by students on appropriate technologies to support collaboration, and the impact on their long term practices and digital literacies.
As the use of technology becomes increasingly embedded into everyday working practices, the softer skills required to support authentic asynchronous collaboration have become more important graduate attributes than “harder” IT skills developed in isolation from real world applications (Archer and Davison 2008). This paper will outline how enabling a student-led approach to the strategic definition and use of appropriate technologies, has been successful in supporting the transferrable softer skills essential for collaborative processes and broader employability.
Refs
Archer, W. and Davison J. (2008) Graduate employability: What do employers think and want? London, the Council for Industry and Higher Education (CIHE).
CBI. (2011). Building for growth: business priorities for education and skills Education and skills survey 2011. [Online]. Available athttp://www.cbi.org.uk/media/1051530/cbi__edi_education___skills_survey_2011.pdf
Authors
| Name | Simon John Davis |
| Affiliation | University of York |
| Country | United Kingdom |
