“The outcome of this curriculum review is that both students and staff are now much clearer about the aims of every session, this has improved student motivation, encouraged independent learning and helped to improve feedback.
All of our modules have learning outcomes associated with them but Kay’s talk made me realise the importance of re-evaluating these often and considering using these as a framework for curriculum development.

“In another presentation Max Wilson from Computer Science described activities he’d arranged to engage students with the school. He set up a peer mentoring scheme in which first year students were put into groups and given a second-year student ‘Guru’. The purpose of the scheme was to introduce the first years to their tutors, help them with the transition to University and take them to social events. After week 1 the mentoring gradually tailed off but it was maintained for students who were still benefitting from it. Max also set up competitions for fun which saw students taking part in ‘hackathons’ overnight, and travelling to similar events in Europe. These ideas have given me a totally different perspective on engaging students, we always focus on engaging students in each individual module but perhaps by having additional activities which are just for fun could really help improve the engagement within the school.”

Dr Anna Bertram
School of Chemistry

Recordings of conference presentations are available from:
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/teaching/event/cr-conference.aspx

Visit the University’s Studying Effectively website for more on learning at University.

Visit the University’s Studying Effectively website for more on learning at University.

Visit the University’s Studying Effectively website for more on learning at University.

Visit the University’s Studying Effectively website for more on learning at University.

Keys to Success
“Some of these have been highlighted in the other posts from those involved, but from my perspective there were a number of critical factors to the successful delivery of this international cross-campus company-based project.

Candidates and Supervisors
“Candidates need to be committed to undertaking a company-based project, be interested in the topic, engage with the firm and its capabilities/vision, and have the capabilities to collect data and generate meaningful insights for the company.
The supervisors need to be prepared to work as a team and to engage with the firm as part of the project. This is vital to ensure shared understanding is developed but also offers benefits in the form of company contacts and knowledge and increased interaction with other campus colleagues.

Clarifying Roles and Responsibilities
“A key issue with a collaborative project like this is for the supervisors to delineate and clarify the roles of the students involved. Company-based projects, like all MBA projects, require students to undertake independent research and the output need to be the work of a single student. Therefore, some thought was required to ensure that the project brief, which was written as a single market entry strategy project, was divided in such a way as to create two distinct projects that, combined, would then deliver on the company’s brief. It was important to get this right, as the students needed to be clear about which parts of the overall brief fell within their project remit.

“As the UK supervisor, I felt that it was important to personally visit the company. This meeting reinforced NUBS’s commitment to the firm and the project and allowed a clear combined vision to be developed, fleshing out the outline brief, clarifying exactly what was feasible within the timescales and managing expectations on the process and outcomes, such as, time scales, company support, student visits to the company, and financial arrangements.

“Meeting minutes were then circulated to ensure that the discussion and agreements made were disseminated to the whole team. The supervisors discussed the meeting and finalised our decisions regarding the scope of the two separate projects. The students gave views on which project they would prefer to complete and final agreements were reached on which student would complete which project.

Collaborative Relationships
Supervisors
“I actually think it helped that Anita and I knew each other before the project, because it made it easier to get going. However, I wouldn’t say that this was necessary, particularly with the ease of which we can now communicate through such packages as skype.

“Once the separate projects were defined, the role of the supervisors was then to ensure that their student was clear on their individual project and to support them through the process – the same as other projects. However, because of the importance of the combined outcome of the projects, we needed to keep in contact with each other regularly regarding the direction that our student was going in and their progress. Furthermore, we also agreed to cover for each other’s holiday periods; to ensure that the students were never without guidance. While we both saw this interaction and cover as somewhat over-and-above usual procedures, we both agreed that it was important to ensure the smooth running of such a project and delivery of the company outputs.

Students
“Professor Avvari highlights the importance of complementary resources between campuses. These complementary resources are also important at a project level. The students have to work together as a team, recognising the different positions, roles and access to information. This knowledge sharing is vital to the success of the project.

“The UK student had a very important role in visiting the company to generate a deeper understanding of their offerings, operations, and company objectives and then sharing this company knowledge with the student who is based at the overseas campus.

“The overseas student then had more local knowledge about the countries being examined, which they needed to share with the UK student to support their understanding and familiarity with the market environment prior to and during the visit.

“During the project, it is absolutely vital that the students work together. Early in the projects much of this interaction is focused on sharing material and knowledge. When designing the research methods, the students need to ensure that their separate sections will capture the necessary data to deliver on the company project brief. Later in the project it can be necessary to collect data jointly, to ensure that companies are not overtaxed with multiple visits.
Clearly, while I am stressing the need for the students to work together, it is also important to balance the requirements for independent student study (highlighted earlier) with the needs for delivering overall recommendations that the company. In the final stages of the dissertation, the students therefore focus on analysing the data related to their topic and presenting their own findings and recommendations.

Post Project Work
“Collaboration and additional commitment from the students is required again after their projects are handed in, in order to combine the work from the individual projects to produce a coherent report to the client that draws the two strands together in such a way as to be able to offer actionable insights. Supervisors are also necessary at this stage to support the students in developing the report and presentation. Ultimately the company-based projects will only be successful if the information that is presented back to the client is in a format that they can digest.
While the additional efforts in generating the separate company report and presentation are not assessed, these activities are vital to the success of the project and offer a valuable skill development opportunity for the students in terms of producing a client report and presenting the findings, explaining and defending the conclusions drawn.

Support from the University and the Company
“The interaction and data collection opportunities that are vital to succeeding in developing good project outcomes are made possible by the excellent financial support from NUBS and the company with regards to travel.

“Furthermore, these projects require a reasonable commitment from the company to give time over to explaining the business to the student and in pointing the student to important reports, events, data collection opportunities. This firm commitment is essential to ensuring that the findings are focused on providing actionable recommendations that fit the companies objectives/focus. The more the company gives to the project, the more likely the students are to generate meaningful insights.”

Prof Vicky Story
Associate Professor in Marketing and Exec MBA Programme Director
Nottingham University Business School

This is the one of a series of blogs about setting up and supervising international and inter-campus projects based on the experiences of staff at the Nottingham University Business School(NUBS). Other blog posts in this series examine:

• Setting up an international Masters project – a UK perspective
• Setting up an international Masters project – a Malaysia perspective
• Supervising an international Masters project – a Malaysia perspective

This post is shared with the ‘Knowledge Without Borders’ blog, the University’s blog looking at transnational higher education and the internationalisation of universities.

The University provides funding through the Inter-campus Staff Mobility Fund (login required) to support staff travel between campuses.

Visit the University’s Studying Effectively website for more on learning at University.

“In chronological order, we began with an advertisement by email of the opportunity to the MBA students when they were beginning to consider supervisors and project topics. We provided the brief and also asked students to provide a proposal that would be assessed. The better proposal would be selected for this collaborative effort. Two students submitted a proposal and the better proposal was chosen.

“Prof Vicky and I then considered how the brief could be expanded into research tasks that could be divided for the two supervised students across campuses. Due to the nature of the origin of the project which was in the UK, Prof. Vicky Story in the UK and myself spoke over Skype. We initially laid down the separation of duties so that the students involved in Malaysia and in the UK could each do separate components to produce individual project reports that contributed to the completion of their respective MBAs. Importantly, the two components produced by the students would contribute to an overall research presentation and report to the industry counterpart in the UK.

“This was followed by subsequent communications and meetings with the Malaysian student. The first meeting was mainly to discuss the key areas the student should focus on in relation to the brief, this was followed by supervision of the general content, primary data gathering efforts and secondary data required , followed by meetings to discuss the organization and presentation of findings. In this effort however it is important to highlight that an important dimension was communication and exchange of ideas between students. We encouraged their communication and provided our inputs into their individual sections when required. This was further augmented by the student from UK flying over to Kuala Lumpur for the collection of primary data on consumers for his part of the research effort. The student from Malaysia also flew over to the UK towards the end of the project. However, due to my own schedule and changes in the final presentation date, I could not go over to the UK to supervise the presentation to the industry partners. The students however were both in the UK, and with guidance from the UK supervisor Prof Vicky – they presented to the firm with very good feedback.

Overall, a number of factors were important in its success:

1. The communication and collaboration between supervisors in the campuses.
   For such a collaborative effort, supervisors must devote some time to discuss and exchange ideas at any stage of the project. These discussions may involve skype meetings which may be more lengthy, email exchanges or even a quick telephone call. Without these discussions and exchange of ideas, the effort would not progress. Prof Vicky and I did our best to communicate with each other as often as possible to catch up on student progress in the first instance, and discuss any matters as they arise.
2. Students have to be equally committed to the effort – to exchange ideas and have discussions not only with the local supervisors but also the other campus supervisors and students if needed in order to coordinate efforts to produce a more coherent project report. This is important as it involves a significant amount of funding, students themselves should not view this as an opportunity to enjoy a break at another country or campus. It has to be clear to students that work and results are expected for this type of collaborative efforts.
3. An equally committed contact person in the firm. – the firm should also be happy to exchange information with the students and the supervisors. Only then would the research effort provide inputs which are useful for charting the company strategy or resolving a company challenge. On numerous occasions, students had queries and contacted the contact person in the firm for information and help with information resources. It is important, that such a dedicated person exists and is informed about the collaborative efforts and all that is involved.
4. Lastly but not least, the support of the management of both campuses and the management team of the collaborative efforts. In this case, due to the nature of the project, sometimes there were matters that needed to be resolved immediately and I am sure that the students involved and myself were very pleased that the management teams of the collaborative efforts as well as any administrative support that was made available was quick to act and respond to queries, resolving matters as they arose. This effort would not have been possible without such a level of responsiveness. While it may not always fit in with our office hours – the academic support was only one part of the equation.

As pointed out by Dr Duncan Shaw and Prof Mohan Avvatari in previous posts (Setting up an international Masters project – a UK perspective and Setting up an international Masters project – a Malaysia perspective respectively), the potential for projects through cross campus collaborative efforts is immense. While it normally encompasses the various postgraduate programmes , it may also be expanded to executive education programmes . With the lower cost of communications in current times, we have to take the opportunity of the complementary and additive resources we have in the three campuses to open more doors for collaborative efforts.

Anita Chakrabarty
Assistant Professor of Marketing, Deputy Director of Undergraduate Programmes – Admissions, Divisional Academic Director (Strategy and Marketing).
Faculty of Social Sciences

This is the one of a series of blogs about setting up and supervising international and inter-campus projects based on the experiences of staff at the Nottingham University Business School(NUBS). Other blog posts in this series examine:

• Setting up an international Masters project – a Malaysia perspective
• Setting up an international Masters project – a UK perspective
• Supervising an international Masters project – a UK perspective

This post is shared with the ‘Knowledge Without Borders’ blog, the University’s blog looking at transnational higher education and the internationalisation of universities.

The University provides funding through the Inter-campus Staff Mobility Fund (login required) to support staff travel between campuses.

“At the Malaysia campus, we have always felt that there is a lot of potential to do all kinds of international projects – not just MBA student projects, but also along with colleagues and students from Nottingham’s campuses in UK and China. While such efforts are on amongst colleagues sporadically based on contacts developed individually – when the idea of an international project involving students from two campuses was mooted by Duncan, when he visited Malaysia last year, we were quite glad and got on it immediately and the first and very successful international project has now been completed and here are some of our viewpoints:

Planning Projects – Research, Student or Teaching & Training Projects are International Ones

• Whether it’s an MBA student project or MSc Dissertation, Research Projects or even Training (and finally Consultancy) – it’s good to develop projects – comparative studies or based on complementary resources (capabilities of colleagues in UK and China campuses). Planning based on complementary resources help also to overcome the fact that our individual objectives may be different.
• The three locations of campuses offer potential in developing research projects as comparative studies (Ningbo – China perspectives , Malaysia – South East Asian perspectives and UK – Western/EU perspectives) and Industry projects (with MBA or MSc students) for such topics as Market Entry studies, International Business Strategy studies etc.

“As colleagues develop research proposals seeking funding or executive education programmes, it would be good to communicate to relevant colleagues across campuses. At Malaysia, we now have a person in charge of ‘external relations’ (myself) to whom colleagues can write to get connected to the correct person. We can identify such a person in Ningbo and in UK also.

Connecting with Colleagues Critical

• There are several colleagues who have travelled between campuses and it’s good to take their help as intermediaries to connect with relevant colleagues. Starting with email introductions is certainly a useful way to start off the process of getting to know colleagues across campuses –
• But meeting colleagues is critical – and helps a lot in developing a relationships. This of course requires travelling between campuses – while it would be great to have a fund and opportunity for one and all to visit each other – there is a need for inter-campus visit funds and other funds like the RKTB fund for research project.
• ICCSR has now held its annual conference in China campus and this year planning it in Malaysia – facilitating meeting of colleagues from all three campuses with CSR interests along with other international colleagues. It would be good if other UK based research centres hold their meetings in Malaysia and China (with Air Asia flights can be reasonable and organizing costs in Malaysia can be reasonable). In Malaysia, in addition to working with NUBS colleagues – its quite easy to connect with colleagues in other school in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences as we are all in one building (Inter-disciplinary project possibilities)

Role of Project Supervisors (for MBA Student Projects or MSc Dissertations)

• Such projects involve two colleagues – and so additional communication commitments between the two supervisors and then among all involved (in the case of an MBA project it would at least 4 people).
• Simple project management is needed to get any cross campus projects to go smoothly – supervising students across different time zones can be actually quite comfortable – UK communication is seen first thing in the morning by Malaysian colleagues and Malaysian communications are seen first thing in the morning by UK colleagues (just a matter of understanding a small time lag). Malaysia and China is small difference and so not such an issue. Also IP phone and Skype offer economical communication.

International Students Projects Selecting Candidates

• It is important to ensure we have a candidate who would commit better to the project – given that they would be working cross culturally and also have to present to the company. We put in place a simple procedure – asked students to submit proposals for the project and selected based on proposal quality and also with some background information of the candidate (class performance and opinions from colleagues)
• Role of the candidates – communications of progress and getting ready to present – in future we have ensure that students in such projects should be communicating updates / progress for the project . They should also practice presentation (using skype or any other web tools)

Developing further on this pilot sort of project

• The first UK – Malaysia MBA student project should lead to more such collaborative projects – students related, comparative research studies and finally training and consultancy projects.
• Most topics or ideas related to business studies have the potential of being investigated in the three very different locations of the University – I am sure (supporting Duncan’s view), most of us would love to do projects that looks into the potential for a three country approach to research, teaching and business engagement.
• In Malaysia we are developing Executive Education programmes and if programme are developed in collaboration with UK and China colleagues there is immense potential.
• Our China campus colleagues attempted a three campus e-teaching of a module (didn’t take off due to lack of funding at that time). We hope that such efforts will be revived – eg. modules like methodology related module can be taught with the different expertise available in different location or other module which lend themselves for sessions to develop discussions involving cross cultural perspectives (Business Ethics, Marketing and many other such modules)

“So be it in MBA/MSc student projects, in teaching, in training / executive education and finally research projects – look forward to more collaborative project among colleagues in the three campuses.”

Prof Mohan V Avvari
Associate Professor of Strategic Management and Deputy Dean (Business Engagement and External Relations)
Faculty of Social Sciences

This is the one of a series of blogs about setting up and supervising international and inter-campus projects based on the experiences of staff at the Nottingham University Business School(NUBS). Other blog posts in this series examine:

• Setting up an international Masters project – a UK perspective
• Supervising an international Masters project – a UK perspective
• Supervising an international Masters project – a Malaysia perspective

This post is shared with the ‘Knowledge Without Borders’ blog, the University’s blog looking at transnational higher education and the internationalisation of universities.

The University provides funding through the Inter-campus Staff Mobility Fund (login required) to support staff travel between campuses.

“Many MBAs love doing projects with external organisations because it gives them access to the full commercial context of their work, they can see how it helps the firm and they have a much more compelling addition their CVs than a normal thesis. In the best projects our MBAs tackle a hot topic that a whole industry might be wrestling with that summer – which makes a great subject to talk about in job interviews and the project can also generate a new network of job-finding contacts.

“But it is sometimes difficult to convince firms that the effort of hosting an MBA project – even just answering questions from the student – is worth it. Also, MBAs are commonly attracted to high profile and international firms – they like the glitter.

“A few years ago I was looking for a source of new projects that would be interesting and attention-grabbing enough for our MBAs. Then I got thinking about how we have three international UoN locations plus partner agreements, like in Singapore, and I started the process of setting up an inter-campus project. Here’s how I did it:

1. Plan the international project – I have done many MBA projects over the years so I knew I’d need a supervisor from UNMC plus the strong support of colleagues from the business school there.
2. Get some contacts – I didn’t know anyone at UNMC but one of my colleagues had worked there. She very kindly advised me on who I needed to talk to and then she made introductions by email. I think the most valuable thing she did was to communicate, either implicitly or explicitly, that it was worth having a chat with me – i.e. I wasn’t some strange mad guy.
3. Visit your new colleagues – you need more than email to start new relationships. People need to see and hear each other to start building trust and getting to know each other. Fortunately there are several budgets available in the university – for teaching development or inter-campus development – that can be used to fund a trip.You will have to justify it well – I pointed out how inter-campus projects would help our forthcoming accreditations for some important business school associations – but make sure that you go over and meet people. There are always extra people to talk to and a teaching-related trip can easily start a new research-related relationship and vice versa.
4. Listen to your new colleagues – what ever happens next has to work for everyone. Do not assume that your new colleagues will have the same objectives and ideas for activities that you do. Listen to their advice.
5. Do what you promise – meeting people on international trips is very exciting but it is easy to forget about what was agreed when you get home and are confronted with 500 emails from students and colleagues. But if you do not keep moving the project forward then the relationships will wither and die.When I came back from UNMC I found a firm that wanted to research new market entry opportunities in South East Asia. This was a great opportunity to hold a joint project with a student from UNMC and one from UNUK.
6. Make sure that the project works – a first international project is the foundation for future projects of different types. But you can only build on success. In this project we were lucky because the two project supervisors were highly professional and very experienced at working with firms. Make sure that you pick great people to implement the project.
7. Build on the project – on the back of the project we ran last year I have got funding to travel to China to try and do the same thing again at UNCC. More importantly, I have got to know a small network of people that are interested in projects that are above the level of a single campus.

“There is a vast untapped potential for UON in projects that are above the level of a single campus. Not just teaching-related, i.e. any projects that use the capabilities of one of our diverse locations to satisfy the needs of another – it’s a sort of ‘capabilities-needs arbitrage’ between continents and countries.

“The UoN has vast arbitrage opportunities in teaching, research and helping society because the UoN is actually a platform for linking campuses in three very different countries. I would love to do a project that looks into the potential for a three country approach to research, teaching and business engagement.”

Dr Duncan Shaw
Lecturer in Information Systems and MBA Management Projects Co-ordinator
Nottingham University Business School

This is the first in a series of blogs about setting up and supervising international and inter-campus projects based on the experiences of staff at the Nottingham University Business School(NUBS). Future blog posts in this series will examine:

• Setting up an international project – a Malaysia perspective
• Supervising an international project – a Malaysia perspective
• Supervising an international project – a UK perspective

This post is shared with the ‘Knowledge Without Borders’ blog, the University’s blog looking at transnational higher education and the internationalisation of universities.

The University provides funding through the Inter-campus Staff Mobility Fund (login required) to support staff travel between campuses.