Employability Skills in Large Business Modules: Built-in or Bolted-on?

Robertson, Stephen; Edwards, April

Abstract

What did you do?
We integrated Confident Future’s ‘Making Feedback Work for You’ session into a very large 2nd Year Business School module. Rather than view the session as a bolt-on we built it in and included an exam question on the session content applied to the workplace.

How did you do it?
We selected the Feedback session as we believed that it matched the module content as one of the biggest challenges for managers is giving feedback to staff, particularly in a team context.

In Week 7 the Confident Futures team delivered the lecture and workshops but the Module Team did attend their tutorials to give the students the opportunity to discuss the feedback with the author where further clarification was required.
Why did you do it that way?
To achieve the maximum impact from the session the timing was key issue: students had to receive their presentation feedback before the tutorial session so that they could discuss the content of the feedback with the tutor.
What difference did it make?
Initial student feedback was positive and this was reflected in the Module Questionnaire. More students thought that the feedback they had been given helped their subject learning. There was also a slight increase in the average pass mark suggesting that some of the students were able to translate the comments into action.

The Module Delivery team were also able to receive feedback on their feedback to help develop the information given to students in future cohorts.

Citation

Robertson, S., & Edwards, A. (2015). Employability Skills in Large Business Modules: Built-in or Bolted-on?.

• Conference Name: LTA Staff Conference 2015
• Start Date: Jun 19, 2015
• End Date: Jun 19, 2015
• Publication Date: Jun 19, 2015
• Deposit Date: Jun 22, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 22, 2015
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: Employability; work experience; student placements; employment skills; feedback
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/id/eprint/8744