REFLECTIONS ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF A NEW INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS COURSE

Jeffrey Cornwall, University of St. Thomas Richard Rexeisen, University of St. Thomas Thomas Mason, University of St. Thomas Abstract The faculty of an undergraduate business program at a private regional university with five departments conducted a major review and revision of its core curriculum. The core is a set of courses all business majors must take regardless of their specialization. One of the courses in the new core is an introduction to business course, Ethics and Practice: Foundations of Business, which includes not only an introduction to traditional components of business study (marketing, management, finance, etc.) but also a strong emphasis on business ethics. An interdepartmental committee of division faculty met over several weeks to establish broad course objectives. This paper will detail the process of creating this course, a detailed description of the course content, and discussion of lessons learned by the team. I. INTRODUCTION The faculty of an undergraduate business program at the University of St. Thomas, a private regional university, conducted a major review and revision of its core curriculum. The core is a set of courses all business majors coming from five departments within the business program must complete regardless of their specialization. One of the courses in the new core is an introduction to business course, Ethics and Practice: Foundations of Business, which includes not only an introduction to traditional components of business study (marketing, management, finance, etc.) but also a strong emphasis on business ethics. An interdepartmental committee of division faculty met over several weeks to establish broad course objectives. As an outcome of the curriculum revision, the business faculty committed to Ethics and Practice: Foundations of Business being a multi-disciplinary effort with faculty from all five departments teaching the course in multi-disciplinary teaching teams. After the various levels in the university hierarchy gave their approval to the curriculum change, the next step was to offer four pilot sections of the new course before the rest of the new curriculum is phased in. This is where our story begins. II. COURSE DEVELOPMENT Four seasoned professors agreed to teach the four pilot sections of this course: the holder of the Sandra Schulze Chair in Entrepreneurship, a Full Professor in Marketing, an Associate Professor in Management, and a tenured Assistant Professor in Accounting. Collectively they taught forty years at the University. The course at this point only existed as a course title and description, eight broad course objectives, and a mandate for a common final exam.

The course description from the University of St. Thomas Catalog 2000-2002 reads as follows: An introduction to the various functions, organizational structures, social responsibilities, and ethical and professional challenges of business in current practice and history. Students are expected to fully integrate the business concepts discussed with basic themes in business ethics. The final exam for this course will be administered at a common time to all students enrolled.The common final is an integral part of this course, and is mandatory for all students (p.68). The learning objectives for the course were as follows: 1. Students will understand the functional areas of Business Administration and the interaction between business decisions, values, and ethics. 2. Students will understand the evolution of business enterprises. 3. Students will understand macro structure and theory of business. 4. Students will understand the ethical choices they may be faced with as individuals, as decision-makers in firms, and as citizens in society. 5. Students will understand group dynamics and conflict management in practice. 6. Students will improve their critical thinking and analytical skills. 7. Students will improve their business writing skills. 8. Students will begin to learn to make the transition from student to professional. One option at this point was for each professor to teach his section independently and then meet at the end of the semester to discuss what worked and what didnt. Another option was to agree on a set of common topics and then each choose a text and establish the sequence of topics and class activities for each section independently. However, given the objective to teach students the integrated nature of business, it was agreed from the start that the course would be created and taught as a team. The team held a series of meetings to establish a common text, syllabus, and course calendar for the four sections with common topic sequence, assignments, and exams. More importantly, the team had to agree on a commonly acceptable model to organize the course. One more traditional approach was to present the different functional areas of business as discreet topics over the semester. However, since Entrepreneurship has a major presence within the business program, the team decided to use the entrepreneurial process as the organizing model. It was considered to be an effective model that would achieve the first three learning objectives for the course listed above. Specifically, the model followed the life cycle of a business organization. Textbook selection had to take into account the fact that the structural model used for the course is somewhat non-traditional for an introductory business course, and that the course was a gateway pre-requisite for the business core. The book needed to have adequate coverage of entrepreneurship and ethics, and had fairly flexible functional content chapters that were adaptable to the course structure. None of the several best selling textbooks were an obvious fit for the course, but several seemed to meet our basic criteria. The book that was chosen was Business: A Changing World (Ferrell & Hirt, 2000). III. COURSE STRUCTURE AND CONTENT Conveniently, one of the instructors had been a successful entrepreneur and was a specialist in that area. He launched the course with a discussion of the impulse to create a new business and how that impulse, combined with an idea for a new or better product or service, can be

transformed into a going concern. From there, discussion moved into the environment in which the new business operates: economic, legal, and ethical. The need of the new business to keep score, to measure success, moved the class into basic accounting and finance. Exploring opportunities for the new business to grow will lead us to look at the technology revolution and the global marketplace. Success, of course, brings its own challenges for the growing business. There is the need to rationalize the structure of the organization and formalize the process of creating strategy, managing work, and maintaining a stable work force. Concerns for market share, quality, and efficiency create the need for a structured marketing plan built on, among other things, a thorough identification and exploitation of the supply chain. The danger of becoming weighted down with structure and bureaucracy brought the course full circle with the challenge to keep the entrepreneurial spirit alive within the now thriving business. The semester ended with discussion of the transition from student to professional and the process of creating a career.
Figure 1

Model of Curriculum for Ethics and Practice: Foundations in Business

Revenues

Time

A Business Begins
Entrepreneurship: The business life cycle The Economic Environment The Legal Environment Introduction to Business Ethics Measuring Success: The basic financial equation The Global Environment The Technology Revolution Entrepreneurship: Business opportunities and the start-up process

Business Growth
Market Success: The marketing mix Measuring success: Basic financial statements and ratios Growth Challenges Managing Growth: Challenges of Group Dynamics and Conflict

Mature Businesses
Managing the Intellectual Capital Leading and Motivating Managing the Operation Operations and the Competitive Edge Marketing Strategy Remaining Competitive: The Entrepreneur Revisited

Ethics

The class was scheduled to meet twice a week. On Tuesdays all four of the instructors met with the combined sections (approximately 120 students, mostly freshmen) in a lecture hall for an hour and forty minutes. Each week one of the instructors was the class coordinator, and the other three were present in supporting roles. On Thursdays, each instructor met with his section of about thirty students to follow up and elaborate on the topics discussed the previous Tuesday and to address issues of business ethics that relate to the topic covered on Tuesday. Business ethics was infused primarily through cases and short readings that tied to the different topics. For example, when covering entrepreneurship a case involving an ethical dilemma for a start-up venture was analyzed. IV. COURSE MANAGEMENT An important key to effective team-teaching was coordination be the instructors. Each Friday, the four instructors met to debrief on the weeks class sessions and to finalize plans for the coming week. We also reviewed possible exam questions from the weeks topic and agreed on criteria for grading case and other short papers assigned. Several challenges in team teaching arose during the semester. First, each of the instructors had very different teaching styles. Some of the instructors styles fit better in the larger lecture, while others had styles that fit best in the smaller sections. The instructors openly discussed and critiqued what was working well and what wasnt to help each other improve in both settings. A second challenge was to find common ground on classroom management. Specifically, the group made joint decisions on issues such as attendance, make-up assignments, and student misconduct. Often this required finding a compromise position that all could agree upon. A third challenge was to agree upon consistent expectations for student performance on papers. The instructors established common evaluation criteria and weightings for each assigned paper. A final challenge occurred as one of the instructors made the decision to leave the university for a position in the private sector. As a fully integrated teaching team, this required that the remaining instructors pick up much of the workload of the final six weeks of the course. Particular attention had to be given to the students assigned to this instructor, to ensure that they received the proper content to be ready for the common final exam and that their first exposure to their business major remain a positive one. The rest of the business faculty was carefully scrutinizing this pilot group of four teamed sections. Faculty acceptance would likely gauge their willingness to teach in teams as the course was fully rolled out the next semester. The pilot team was able to keep student satisfaction at an acceptable level and demonstrated to the faculty that such obstacles could be overcome. The course expanded to about thirty sections the following academic year and was fully staffed and fully enrolled. V. TEACHING FRESHMEN Three of the members of the teaching team had never taught college freshman before. Teaching college freshmen creates unique challenges (Erickson & Strommer, 1991). The majority of college freshmen are still most comfortable receiving knowledge as facts to be memorized. This is consistent with much of their learning experience before entering college. Many have had little experience with the nuances of more subjective or relative knowledge. This becomes a particular challenge when teaching about business ethics. Many in the classes were

uncomfortable with the notion that there is no right answer to an ethics case. Those in the team who had previously taught ethics to upper classmen were particularly struck by this difference. Erickson & Stommer (1991) state that typically students begin to progress to subjective or relative knowledge by the time they reach the upper division coursework in college. Care had to be taken to address not only the content of business ethics, but to carefully help the students become more confident with subjective or relative knowledge. Another topic area that posed a similar challenge was in teaching motivation and leadership theories to college freshmen. Many of the students were frustrated by the fact that there was no one theory of motivation or leadership that explained these concepts fully. The team used experiential exercises in the smaller Thursday sections to illustrate how aspects of all of the basic theories have some validity, but that no one theory explains everything that they will face in motivating and leading. VI. ROLLOUT OF THE COURSE As the full roll-out of the course was being planned, the teaching team met to debrief on the experience and prepare to help train and orient the faculty who would be teaching the Ethics and Practice: Foundations in Business during the next academic year. One outcome of the debriefing was the realization that the team had not adequately addressed the importance of fully recognizing the differences not just in teaching style, but in work style as well. Some in the team were very comfortable with adapting on the spot and being more extemporaneous, particularly in the smaller Thursday sessions. However, this was not true of all members. The team realized that attention to differences in working style would need to be a key issue to be considered by future teams. Administration had the challenge of recruiting teaching teams for the next year that balanced academic disciplines within each team and yet put compatible faculty together. This required the team from the pilot group serving as ambassadors. Once the faculty were recruited, the team put together a three-day training retreat. The training covered a full range of topics including course structure, team management, teaching freshmen, and lessons learned. The new teams then began the planning process while still in the retreat. This allowed the pilot team to serve as a resource and facilitator as needed. VII. LESSONS LEARNED AND LOOKING AHEAD The challenges of the long-term management and administration of a set of teaching teams are still being discovered. An on-going commitment to training and professional development will be required to make this course successful over the years to come. Data will be compiled to assess the effectiveness of the course in meeting its basic learning objectives. Assessment will also be made of the course in being an effective gateway course that adequately prepares students for all of the other core courses and specific courses in the various majors in the undergraduate business program. Initial student surveys and informal student focus groups indicate that the initial reaction is positive. However, it will be important to continue to assess and evaluate this course as it evolves over the next several years.

VIII. REFERENCES Erickson, B, & Strommer, D. (1991). Teaching College Freshmen. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Ferrell, O. & Hirt, G. (2000). McGraw-Hill. Business: A Changing World (3 rd Edition). Boston: Irwin

University of St. Thomas Undergraduate Catalog, 2000-2002.