The Use of Personal Journals for Assessment of an Undergraduate Enterprise Module

Abstract

A personal journal has been used for three years as part of the assessment of a ten credit “Entrepreneurial Skills” module offered as an option for a number of subject areas at Manchester University, including civil engineering, biology, chemistry, computer science and geography. The aim is to introduce students to companies, business models, finance and with an emphasis on analysis rather than simple repetition with the aim of getting the students to think how business issues could be applied to their subject area. Entrepreneurship is very much concerned with the development of transferable skills and the personal journal is one of the ways we at Manchester have found to help students think about how to gain transferable skills and think about what employers are looking for in addition to specialist knowledge in the students own subject area. The transferable skills element of these courses have proved to be a large selling point to other departments whose more traditional courses often do not offer this transferable skills training. The ten credit module involves 10 one hour lectures and 10 one hour workshops, using the lectures to teach basic principles and workshops to give the students the tools to complete the projects - In teams the students gather information on a well known “entrepreneurial” company and from this pool of information prepare a 20 minute PowerPoint presentation in groups and write individual reports. The project involves studying an entrepreneurial company of each group’s choice and producing a report with conclusions and recommendations as to whether it is doing well/badly and what it should do in the future. There is no examination for the course. The Journal has formed part of the assessment for the course (15%) along with a project report (60%) and group presentations (25%). The journal has four sections. 1) A skills audit of transferable skills such as presentation skills, report writing, to identify strengths and weaknesses and formulate a plan for improving. 2) A “diary” section where the student comments and reflects on experiences during the 12 week course e.g. lectures and workshops, when they have met in their groups outside of work time, individual research etc. This section is fairly flexible and left to the students as to what they include as long as it is reflective 3) A section where they can detail what they have done to demonstrate each of a range of transferable skills during the project. 4) A statement of involvement in the group work to ensure work has been divided equally is also included – giving them an explicit opportunity to state what they have done, and what others in the group have done for the project (Working in groups clearly gives weaker students the opportunity to do little work without this safeguard). We have found a number of benefits of using the journals, for example, it helps students focus on transferable skills and records strengths/weaknesses and helps them to structure future plans. It encourages lifelong learning and reflection and learning by experiencing. It has also provided a number of hidden benefits – It encourages student attendance (so the students actually have experiences to write about in the journal), provides feedback to the lecturing team, and encourages all students to participate equally in the project because of the statement of involvement. One of the most remarkable and unexpected aspects of the use of the journals has been the amount of candid feedback which the students have supplied. This has been far more useful than the feedback supplied on the anonymous feedback forms which the university uses to assess student satisfaction with courses. This has in fact been used to modify the courses in future years. This paper will also look at differences in approaches from different subject areas to the completing of the journals, differences in approaches from small workshop groups (4-5 students) compared to larger groups (25-30) and how we have used the feedback to improve the course.