Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/54894
FOCUS ON INNOVATION Teaching Differently Faculty and administration at the University of Central Missouri put their management students in charge of the learning process. Nothing spurs innovation in a business curriculum like con- sensus among faculty that it's time for new ways of teaching. That's what happened nine years ago at the University of Central Missouri's Harmon College of Business Administra- tion in Warrensburg, when its senior faculty wanted to shake up Harmon's curriculum and hire teachers who didn't mind making radical changes to the traditional lecture format. When they heard about a program called the Integrated Business Core (IBC) at the University of Oklahoma's Price School of Business in Norman, they were more than a little intrigued. OU's IBC, developed by management professor Larry Michaelson, comprises a multicourse one-semester program in which students create business plans, apply for bank loans, and start businesses, all while taking courses in which con- tent is carefully timed to provide information just as they need it. (IBC was profiled in "Junior Executives," an article in BizEd's May/June 2003 issue.) UCM faculty were so intrigued by the OU program that they offered Michaelson a job implementing a similar pro- gram at Harmon. He took the school up on the offer, and with Michaelson's help, Harmon College developed its Inte- grated Business Experience (IBE), a block of four courses that management majors take during the fall semester of their junior year. The block includes courses in management, marketing, and information systems, as well as an entrepre- neurship and community service practicum. In IBE, students work as employees of a 20-35 mem- ber company where they apply concepts they learn in their courses to engage in two ventures—a startup business and a service project to benefit a charity organization. Students receive a $5,000 loan from a local bank to start their enter- prises and are charged with paying off the loan and making a profit for their charities before semester's end. So far, students have sold everything from bobblehead 50 BizEd JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011 dolls to T-shirts. Last fall, the three student "companies" in the course decided to band together to sell related prod- ucts—sweat pants, sweatbands, and water bottles. So far, all student teams have paid back their loans and made money for their charities. In the six years IBE has been in place, teams have raised more than $170,000, logged hundreds of service hours, and completed a number of projects. One team renovated a Salvation Army disaster relief trailer and wrote a grant to support the renovation of another. Another team built a gymnasium for a local youth home. Yet another raised $23,000 for a local homeless shelter. With IBE, students don't just learn business skills and concepts—they also discover firsthand why those skills and concepts are so important in the workplace, says Christine Wright, a professor of management at UCM who was hired just as IBE was getting started. "I came here because I wanted to teach differently," says Wright. "In this program, faculty give few or no lectures, we plan hands-on projects—and many times, we don't know what's going to happen next." Not all faculty can handle that format, says Wright. "Some faculty have come and left because they weren't able to let go of control in the classroom. They reverted back to lecture format," she says. But for those who stay, it's truly a chance to go off the syllabus and see where students' own learning processes take them. Going Beyond IBE IBE has sparked a culture of innovation that has gone beyond its four core courses. It now sets up a series of nontraditionally taught courses that build on the lessons students learned as they created their businesses in the IBE block. Wright teaches operations management, a spring- semester junior year course that includes a four-week project in which students have to write a request for a proposal to manufacture 60,000 origami stars. They must determine how to fill the order, including where to buy the materi- als, how much those materials will cost, and how long they would need to complete so large a project. That's a different experience, she says, than they'd have learning operations management from textbooks and lectures. Eric Nelson, associate professor of management, teaches teams systems and organizational behavior—also known as "experience-based manage- ment" (XB)—which business stu- dents take in the spring after IBE. At the start of the course,