Digital Age Skills and Collaboration Challenges

Reflecting on BMGN-N340 teaching and learning strategies while examining Marquise's (2012) list unleashed various ways by which the course succeeded in supporting the suggested skills. In addition to traditional textbook and lecture style, the course incorporated various delivery and participatory strategies, like: online class discussions, online individual journals, real-world case studies, supporting YouTube videos, Twitter links to important resources … etc. The described approach is found fully aligned with Marquise's suggested strategy to instill the "passion for digital" in the students' hearts.

The real-world problem-based assignment and project contributed to implementing Marquise's suggested strategy in developing the students Analytical and critical thinking and application skills. As described in previous posts, the Digital Narratives assignment made the students learn part of the course learning outcomes independently, select the type of application they want to further investigate through real-world deployment story in UAE market, and finally develop it as a case study in an original digital narrative.

The course also created opportunities to practice and further develop their communication skills with YouTube discussion of published narratives as well as the traditional written and verbal skills through the course final consultancy project. Moreover, the course also support students understanding of the big picture of the ubiquity of information and its relevance to the course learning outcomes, which emphasized the richness of the information age and the requirement to utilize various methods to source the required details. The course's final project, which was industry based, further developed the students solution-oriented approach to real-world problems through developing a consultancy report to propose a solution to the analyzed problem.

Finally, the role that I, the teacher, played in the Digital Narratives assignment was more of a mentor and facilitator. The fact that many students were not comfortable with to start with, however, it somehow contributed to the readiness of the lucky ones among them to deal with many similar professional relationships in the teams they'll join at the workplace.

 

BMGN-N340 MIS course's final project was designed to give students another opportunity to further develop their collaboration skills. As a group, the students had to investigate a real-world problem(s) that one of the UAE organizations is facing with an Information System. The students were asked to select number of Business Processes that matches the number of individuals in the team, so each member is in charge of analyzing and designing one part of the system, while collaborating with the rest of the team to make sure his piece eventually fall into the right place to complete the team project. It was quite interesting to hear from one of the students experienced this project stating as I was emphasizing the SafeAssign below 10% matching policy: "miss, in this project there is no way to get even 1% matching".

Anderson (2007) blog post and TurnitIn (2011) whitepaper discussion of plagiarism reminded me of this student's comment on his experience with BMGN-N340 final project and made me reflect on the assessment design that made it so hard for students to plagiarize. The happy ending of my reflection exercises was the discovery of the fact that the project was designed in a way that didn't give the students any chance to include any work but their originally developed one. This is an ideal answer for the call of balancing collaborative learning while preventing plagiarism opportunities, which was mainly a consequence of the pure authentic learning nature of the task at hand.