Abstract
The case study is a classic tool used in several educational programs that emphasizes solving of ill-defined problems. Though it has been used in classroom-based teaching and educators have developed a rich repertoire of methods, its use in online courses presents different challenges. To explore factors that develop skills in solving ill-defined problems, I present results of a seven-year study seeking to develop tools for facilitating and assessing skills for case studies in an online graduate class. This study began with the introduction of a classroom-based case method into an online graduate class. Over the following years, I used three sources of data to make changes to the design of the course with respect to case studies: feedback from students, feedback from colleagues, and measurement of student performance. Findings suggest the following general approaches may work better in online classes involving case studies in particular, and more broadly in courses that teach solving of ill-defined problems: 1) immersion (or the use of drills) to support trial and error learning especially given the additional distractions of an online setting as compared to attending classes on campus; 2) structure to facilitate learning as it involves building skills based on absorptive capacity that students acquire from skills learned earlier; 3) social learning to enhance trial and error learning; 4) inductive learning that may be more appropriate to online teaching as compared to deductive learning; 5) provision of structure instead of participation by the instructor may encourage self-discovery of methods to solve ill-defined problems in an online context.
Highlights
There has been a trend in the last two decades that views education’s role as imparting information and the skills to use such information (Brandsford, Brown & Cocking, 2000)
Students in two graduate programs (MBA and MS) took the required course on management information systems (MIS) in which the case study was the major method of demonstrating the application of concepts to various organizational situations
Action: To address the lack of familiarity with the case study methodology, I focused on exposing students to a form of learning that was new to them
Summary
There has been a trend in the last two decades that views education’s role as imparting information and the skills to use such information (Brandsford, Brown & Cocking, 2000). An important aspect of this approach to education is the recent emphasis on “design thinking” in professional schools such as architecture, business, engineering, law, health professions and public policy (Glen, Suciu & Baughin, 2014) Such an approach is even more relevant when teaching students to address ill-defined problems in any such domain. Given the differences between the classroom and online context as discussed earlier, it is not clear which teaching method achieves better learning outcomes in an online setting. It would help a teacher to better explore specific online teaching techniques if one understands how learning to solve ill-defined problems is achieved using case studies. A second research question was: what factors improve student learning when teaching case studies online?
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