Design requirements of a modern business Master’s degree course: perspectives of industry practitioners

Abstract

Contemporary industry practices must be appropriately reflected in designing modern-day teaching and learning programmes. Existing studies are limited to systematic methodologies for accumulating contemporary practice requirements and using that data to inform the design of educational programmes, even though various, local approaches for doing so often exist in higher education institutions. Going beyond this and adopting design-based research (DBR) principles, this paper introduces industry practitioner perspectives of contemporary- practice need for conceptualisation and design of a new business master’s degree programme. Outlining industry-demand as a driving force in stimulating a new business data-analytics programme at a medium-sized Australian metropolitan university, the study utilises open-ended interviews with five senior data analytics professionals to find a new matrix of industry expectations. The emerged elements are open-sourced tools based general technical knowledge; specific industry certifications or special skills; technology integration knowledge; cross-industry knowledge such as marketing; project management/agility and decision-making utilising appropriate supporting knowledge. Based on these findings, key learning objectives, an initial structure of the programme and specialisation subjects is proposed for further evaluation through convergent interviewing. We anticipated that the entire design process could be reusable for other similar situations for designing new practical courses in higher education sector.