Keith Rollag

Teaching Business Cases Online Through Discussion Boards: Strategies and Best Practices

What are the most effective and efficient ways to teach business cases online, specifically in asynchronous electronic discussion boards? This article describes several design strategies and approaches used by instructors at Babson College to structure and facilitate online case discussions in our blended Fast Track MBA program.

Defining the term new in new employee research

Researchers and managers use the term ‘new’ to describe organizational members who have recently joined an organization, but how long are arriving recruits considered ‘new employees’, and what factors drive this new-to-old transition? In this paper I hypothesize that co-worker perceptions of an individuals ‘newness’ in the organization are a function of (1) the individuals relative position in the firms tenure distribution and (2) the frequency of interaction between the rater and the individual. To evaluate these hypotheses I conducted a sociometric survey among four entrepreneurial organizations (N = 200), asking respondents to evaluate the newness of their co-workers. The results support both hypotheses, but suggest that relative tenure (defined as a members percentile rank in the firms tenure distribution) is the strongest predictor of organizational newness perceptions. More specifically, ‘new employees’ are the 30% of the organization with the lowest tenure. This means that organizational growth and turnover have a major effect on how long arriving recruits are considered new employees, which in turn has implications for new employee research in areas like socialization, mentoring, training and career development.

The Bikestuff Simulation: Experiencing the Challenge of Organizational Change.

This article describes a 2-hour experiential simulation that helps students understand (a) the challenge of even simple organizational changes, (b) the importance of communication between change agents and organizational members, and (c) the source of resistance to organizational change efforts. Teams of students compete to process the most customer orders at a bike shop. Although some team members process orders using paper-based catalogs and reference materials, other team members develop and implement a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to automate and speed up their teammates’ order completion process. The simulation produces change agent and worker behaviors similar to those seen in real organizational improvement efforts, and can be used to introduce a variety of organizational behavior concepts related to organizational change, including organizational analysis, group communication, participatory design, resistance to change, organizational inertia, and sociotechnical systems theory.

Technology as the Enabler of a New Wave of Active Learning

Education has always been slow on the uptake of new technology. As instructors, we have established, time-worn methods of teaching, and the performance nature of the job puts an emphasis on reliability and predictability. The last thing an instructor wants to be doing is fumbling around trying to make something work in front of an audience of 200 undergraduates. Although LCD projectors and whiteboards have made purely blackboard-based teaching less common, instructors have resisted more complicated and exotic forms of teaching technology. The bandwidth was not there, the technology was hard to understand and use, and the supporting technology was not robust enough to ensure a reliable, positive learning experience. But things have dramatically changed in the past 10 years. Though we still keep progressing along Moore’s Law and benefit from yearly increases in computer processing speed and cheaper storage, we are finally seeing education technologies that are easy-to-access on a variety of computer platforms, easy-to-use for both students and faculty, and much more robust and failureproof. All of a sudden, we see instructors keen and eager to bring technology into their classrooms and actually doing so in new and exciting ways. We are teaching in a period when the pace of technological change is quite breathtaking. When we wrote the Call for Papers in the summer of 2010, the Guest Editors’ Corner

Chris Pierce and the Yankee Donut Company: An E-Mail-Based Management Simulation

In this article, the authors describe an e-mail-based simulation that helps students experience the fast-paced, complex world of the middle manager. In this electronic in-basket exercise, students assume the role of a district manager in a doughnut company as they respond to a rapid series of high- and low-priority e-mails ostensibly sent from superiors, subordinates, colleagues, and customers. The simulation creates an engaging learning environment that helps students understand the complex world of managers and stimulates their interest in organizational behavior. Because the exercise is designed around standard e-mail technology, the simulation is straightforward and can be easily customized to support other learning objectives.