Description

The teaching format was a one-hour mass lecture and a two-hour seminar in each week with a group size averaging 35. All the seminar tutors participated in the lectures and prepared the materials for their lecture topics and the associated seminar activities. To ensure consistency and assure quality, all these materials were reviewed by the Project Leader before being made available to students on Web-CT.

Intended educational value

These course materials will be useful for for the "Corporate Social Responsibility" course, which has become a compulsory subject for all students in the Faculty of Business.

Example of application

The subject was taught for the first time in semester 1 of 2008/09 to 207 students of the Accounting and Finance programme. It was taught again in the second semester to 54 students of the Management and Marketing programme.

Evaluation/Comments

The Defining Issues Test-2 was completed by the first cohort at both the start and end of the first semester. The results show that students had improved in terms of their ability to define a social problem and were less inclined to conform to Kohlberg's second stage of moral development. However, further analysis is needed to determine whether they became more inclined to follow stage 1 or 3.

Other issues observed on the students’ learning experience were:

• Information overload: Many students felt overwhelmed by the text book and found directed reading helpful. Although they were encouraged to read the news papers, listen to the news and keep a log of CSR news developments, it became apparent that few of them kept abreast of the world's CSR issues.
• Assessment of the best pieces of group work could not discriminate between students’ levels of nderstanding of the materials.
• Many students did not appreciate or have the skills to present a balanced, well-informed, argument for a rather open-ended subject which does not have model answers.
• Essay assignments were required to give students more practice in answering specific questions which involved different viewpoints and also to provide more feedback on their skills. Students thought their learning experience was enhanced in this way.
• Students’ examination results were for the most part very disappointing and it is thought that smaller seminar groups could have a positive effect on their performance and enable staff to provide more support for student learning.

Remarks

The students were generally very enthusiastic and participated fully in the seminar activities. However, some activities were, of course, more successful than others, and the activities will be monitored and revised.