High Educ (2008) 55:33–50DOI 10.1007/s10734-006-9036-2

Learning-based curriculum development

Claus Nygaard Æ Thomas Højlt Æ Mads Hermansen

Received: 1 June 2005/Accepted: 25 August 2006/Published online: 3 October 2006 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006

Abstract This article is written to inspire curriculum developers to centre their efforts on the learning processes of students. It presents a learning-based paradigm for higher education and demonstrates the close relationship between curriculum development and students’ learning processes. The article has three sections: Section ‘‘The role of higher education (HE) institutions’’ presents a discussion of the role of higher education in the knowledge society. Section ‘‘Contextual learning’’ presents the paradigm of contextual learning which we see as a useful foundation for curriculum development. Section ‘‘Curriculum development in practice—the BETA course’’ shows how a particular course in Business Economic Theory and Analysis has been developed using this paradigm. The article will be of interest to all academics interested in students’ learning processes but is especially relevant to those responsible for curriculum development.

Keywords Contextual learning Æ Curriculum development Æ Student’s learning processes

The role of higher education (HE) institutions

It may be a cliche´ to begin an article by arguing that a primary task of HE institutions is to prepare students to manage flexible jobs in changing markets. But the importance of this task cannot be ignored. Societies, businesses and technologies are changing rapidly, and this development has led to the creation of what is today commonly labelled ‘the knowledge society’. Over the last few decades we have seen radical changes in intra- and inter-firm organisation with the demise of the old economy (Best, 1990; Lash & Urry, 1987). Flexible jobs, organised in flexible

C. Nygaard (&) Æ T. Højlt Æ M. HermansenDepartment of Organization and Industrial Sociology & CBS Learning Lab,

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ORIGINAL PAPER

34 High Educ (2008) 55:33–50Copenhagen Business School, Kilevej 14a, Frederiksberg 2000, Denmarke-mail: cn.ll@cbs.dk

networks and embedded in flexible societies, demand graduates with the ability to self-produce and self-develop knowledge. As the tasks, roles and identities of the modern worker have changed with the introduction of new technologies, the need for new competencies has increased. Flexibility is a much needed competitive advantage within firms and, to a large degree, this can be achieved by hiring interdisciplinary employees with transferable knowledge, skills and competencies (Assiter, 1995; Harvey & Knight, 1996). Employees have to be flexible, they must be able to learn how to learn, and they need to develop their own competencies while working in loosely coupled networks. Furthermore, they have to multitask between several integrated or disintegrated projects during a typical day’s work. This societal shift has confronted HE institutions with new challenges and it leads us to define the role of HE institutions as follows:

1. HE institutions have to facilitate students’ competence building within a certain academic field. To do so they need to develop curricula that help students acquire knowledge and that enable them to develop skills for using this knowledge in concrete situations.

2. HE institutions have to facilitate the development of competencies that can be used outside the learning context of HE institutions. To do so they need to develop curricula that enable students to develop competencies which are transferable to contexts other than the academic field studied.

For HE institutions to fulfil the role defined above, it is natural to look at the immediate learning requirements which need to be taken into account when engaging in curriculum development. Although students go to universities and business schools to learn about and train for a specific academic profession, academic professionalism does not equal knowledge of a theoretical discipline alone. In our view, mastery of an academic profession requires that students acquire at least three important competencies:

(1) Competent use of models and theories.(2) Competent use of research methods.(3) Competent analysis of empirical practice.

First, students need to be familiar with all relevant areas of the academic subject in question. They have to know the theories, models and arguments that constitute the relevant body of knowledge, and they have to be able to apply them in data analysis and problem solving.

Second, they must know which research methods are appropriate when adopting particular theories or models from an academic subject, and they should be able to use the chosen research method to analyse data.

Third, they must be able to apply the string of theories and research methods to investigate practice outside HE contexts in a way that is looked upon as being competent by people in these particular contexts. Students need to be familiar with practice, they have to know different practices, they have to be able to manage in practice and they need to transfer their knowledge between practices.

Professionalism is a complex interplay between theories, research methods and practice. In connection to curriculum development, students’ professionalism is to a large

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degree affected by the actual mix of teaching methods, study methods and technologies used in the curriculum.

It is our belief that such learning requirements can be met with success if the curriculum is rooted in a learning-based paradigm that takes into account the learning process of students. When working as a university teacher responsible for curriculum development, it is essential to have a clear conception of student learning (what it is, and how and why it takes place). Insight into the elements of the learning process is central to developing curricula that facilitate students’ development of competencies.

Contextual learning

Learning is a complex of individual and interpersonal processes influenced by both planned and contingent factors. There are many learning theories to choose from, and many useful traditions of learning exist that affect ways in which university teaching is planned and carried out. We base our work with curriculum development on contextual learning theories (Bandura, 1975; Bruner, 1996; Buch, 2000; Hermansen, 2005; Kolb, 1984; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Vygotsky, 1987; Wenger, 1998). Looking at learning in this particular way has practical implications for the ways in which we work with curriculum development (as will also be shown in Section ‘‘Curriculum development in practice—the BETA course’’, where we present the case of a course in Business Economic Theory and Analysis (BETA) which has been developed using the paradigm of contextual learning).

Context

We see context as something of which one is a part rather than something in which one is merely placed. Context is an order of behaviour rather than a topographic structure (McDermott, 1999). From this view of context, we argue that the learning context changes over time. It is never static or fixed. Different orders of behaviour constitute different learning contexts, so to speak. We argue that the auditorium, the classroom, or the working group of students cannot be conceived as identical learning spaces over time. Each gathering of groups of students and teachers (and other key actors) constitutes a unique ongoing system of social relations (Nygaard & Andersen, 2005). Curriculum developers have to bear in mind that the learning processes of students change over time. Staffing requirements, teaching methods, ways of examining and evaluation will be different as the learning context changes. When neither structures nor contexts of action are given or fixed, it is essential that students and teachers interact in a way that facilitates the individual learning processes of the students.

Learning and its components

In general, we see learning as an embedded process, affected by the learner’s identity (Bramming, 2001; Greenwood, 1994; Wenger, 1998) and social position (Lawson, 1997) in ongoing systems of social relations (Granovetter, 1992). In our view, learning is intersubjective and takes place between embedded learners. Learning, as such, is a social process. The class is not just an aggregate group of students, it is a social collectivity in which sets of arrangements, conventions and agreements govern behaviour (Greenwood, 1994). As a curriculum developer, one has to take into account the fact that students engage in an identity project when they go to university; that they are allocated (or fight

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for) a social position within the ongoing systems of social relations in which they are embedded, that they form social relations with other students and teachers, and that their learning process is affected by the outcomes of these social processes and interactions.

We define learning as: the process of acquiring new personal knowledge, skills or competencies, which can be used when meeting forthcoming challenges in life. We distinguish between knowledge, skills and competencies for three reasons: first, we do not want to trivialise the variety of aspects of personal abilities; second, the distinction enables us to grasp the different types of learning that may take place within learning contexts; and third, it makes it possible for us to discuss which pedagogical methods can be employed in order to lead to the creation of either knowledge, skills, or competencies. Our definitions are as follows.

Knowledge

As our research interests link the term knowledge to higher education, knowledge becomes: perceptual experience and reasoning. Students possess knowledge about an academic field when they are able to comprehend theoretical models and make reasoned judgements about their use as appropriate vehicles for data analysis. Knowledge does not represent a true image of reality, but is rather a perceptual experience of reality, an artificial object. At this point we follow Glaserfeld (1989, p. 162) who writes about knowledge: ‘(a) knowledge is not passively received but actively built up by the cognizing subject; (b) the function of cognition is adaptive and serves the organization of the experiential world, not the discovery of ontological reality’. In terms of knowledge, we acknowledge and subscribe to the views of tacit knowledge (Nelson & Winter, 1982; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995; Polanyi, 1962, 1967) as embodied, personal and context-specific knowledge, which is hard to formalise and communicate. Polanyi (1962) argues that tacit knowledge is created through a process of unconscious trial and error, where learners feel their way to success without specifically knowing how they do it. This is true of university students who are not necessarily aware of their own knowledge (e.g. how and why they are able to produce a particular result in a particular course). The role of higher education is, therefore, to help students become aware of and reflexive about their use and linking of theories, methods and practice. Like knowledge acquisition or learning, knowledge production is embedded and acquired during social activity.

Skills

We define a skill as: the ability that has been acquired by training or experience to perform a task or activity to produce solutions in some problem domain. For us, to acquire a skill demands knowledge. We say that students have skills when they are able to actually perform data analysis, with the use of theoretical models, in order to produce a solution to a certain problem. As such, to master a certain skill requires more than knowledge.

Competencies

We define competence as: the ability to apply knowledge and skills so that the task at hand is carried out in such a way that it meets the standard of performance required in a particular context and that the person is looked upon by relevant actors as being competent. Competencies are viewed as qualifications applied to solve problems in practice. In our case, we would say that students are competent when they are able to

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perform to the standards defined by, for example, academia or business. By performance we mean carrying out a task at hand. Learners are always competent in relation to the task itself and the required standard of performance. Selznick (1992) calls this institutionalization, and points to the importance of infused values beyond the mere technical requirements. In order to be competent, students need to be able to carry out a task so that it is completed satisfactorily—both technically and institutionally. Considering the demarcation between skills and competencies, we point at the role of the context. If we take the HE institution as an example, students following a particular course can well be skilled and competent at the same time, because the teacher evaluates the performance of students relative to academic standards. A postgraduate student working in a business, however, may well be skilled (able to produce a solution to a certain problem based on theoretical models and methodological inquiry) but, nevertheless, regarded as being non-competent, because the standard of performance required in the particular business context is different from the standard required in the HE context. As we cannot predict the exact business context in which our students will be employed in the future, it is relevant to say that to be competent demands that the students are able to transfer their knowledge and skills across contexts. It therefore makes sense, when working with curriculum development, to distinguish between qualifications (knowledge and skills) and competencies. Furthermore, this distinction gives us a terminology with which to analyse aspects of curriculum development and discuss its effect on student learning.

The process of learning

So far we have presented the key terminology: context, learning, knowledge, skills, and competencies. In this paragraph we focus on the learning process itself. Following Hermansen (2005) we define three elements that make up the learning process: (1) feedback and feed-forward; (2) habitus–reflection; (3) toil–exuberance. Learning always occurs through an integration of these three elements and must, therefore, be analysed in terms of these dimensions.

Feedback and feed-forward

Learners always move within the framework of past, present and future. As time goes by, future becomes present, and present becomes past. Time enables the writing of history and the creation of contexts and cultures in which the learner is embedded. We perceive the future through our pre-understandings. All learning takes place as a correction or a change of something already known to the learner. Learning is always related to pre-understandings, and the learning process is a process of creating and recreating pre-understandings for future complexity reduction.

Feed-forward is the process of imagining the future as a response to current action and evaluating whether the envisaged situation corresponds to what actually happened. When a person engages in any kind of action s(he) imagines what will happen in the future and what role s(he) is going to play according to the action and the possible responses. Hermansen (2005, p.26) writes ‘So feed-forward is a pre-understanding or an assumption that something specific will happen with a subsequent examination of whether what we did to realise the idea, actually did happen’. Feed-forward establishes a connection between what has been previously done (experience) and assumptions about what may happen in the future when one acts in a certain way. Feed-forward is a process of making pre-understandings and it is concerned with how the world (objects, subjects, actions,

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meanings, understandings, possibilities, etc.) is connected. Feed-forward will usually be a question of rearranging and changing perceptions in a non-radical way because the perception of the future always will be based on the understandings of the past.

Feedback is the process where what one does reacts upon what is done or the way it is done. Hermansen (2005, p. 25) writes: ‘Repeated feedback can be collected in experience. Comparison (unconscious or conscious) of different feedbacks is, however, also the basis for choosing the best, most rewarding or suitable activity. This is the basis of understanding learning processes. We learn from our experiences, so to speak. When we do something to the world, it responds and we learn from the good response. We also learn from the bad response, but do not always know what we have learnt’. Feedback changes pre-understandings and raises questions about how connections can be established in a more meaningful way. Feedback can lead to the modification of the understanding as well as to the reconstruction of the way the world is understood.

Together feedback and feed-forward describe the process of action and reflection that takes place when learners move within the framework of past, present and future. Thus learning is not only situated in linear, chronological time but also in ‘learning time’.

Feedback–feed-forward and curriculum development

The principle of feedback–feed-forward tells us that each student creates a subjective meaning of a situation based on their past experiences and their expectations of the future. This means that each individual student will not learn the same from attending the same lecture or carrying out the same exercise be it theoretical, methodological or practical knowledge, skills or competencies. As learning is based on feedback–feed-forward it requires that the curriculum is developed in such a way that individual learning is facilitated through the pedagogical activities. The curriculum has to be flexible enough to take into account the individual learning processes and the individual creation of meaning of the students. One way to deal with this is to provide as much information about the learning situation as possible. What are the learning requirements? How does the learning situation connect to other learning situations? What are the possible outcomes of the learning situation? Such information helps the individual student to create a subjective meaning based on feedback–feed-forward. Furthermore, the teacher can facilitate group discussions in which each student has the possibility to discuss theoretical, methodological and practical issues. Such discussion sessions require that students articulate their subjective understandings and, by doing so, the individual learning processes of the students are brought in focus. It is a good idea to supplement group discussions and similar sessions with assignments that force students to be very concrete and precise in expressing their theoretical, methodological, and practical knowledge, skills and competencies. In this way the subjective understanding of each student has to be negotiated within the group in order to reach a common statement of meaning, which again puts focus on the individual learning process.

Habitus–reflection

While feedback–feed-forward regards the process of learning, habitus–reflection concerns the level of learning. The discussion about level is connected to degrees of reflection.

Habitus is unconscious learning. It is learning without knowing what is being learned or why. Habitus learning can also be a side effect of a conscious learning process, where only some knowledge, skills or competencies are learned unconsciously. Moreover, habitus

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learning can occur when the learner simply applies a trial and error technique until the right result is reached. The learner then knows how to act in a similar future situation, but does so without explicitly knowing why. It is impossible to always reflect on everything that is done. As such, it is inevitable that a part of the learning process will be habitual—otherwise the learning process would have to start over again every time. The learner will always try to use as little effort as possible to perform what is required, and the more that is performed in a habitual manner, the more energy will be left for other purposes.

Reflection is conscious learning. Reflection is said to occur when you think about what you are learning, where you are learning, how you are learning and why you are learning. Reflecting about what you are learning is when you are able to compare the current input with other knowledge, skills and competencies, to create meaning in what you are learning and find the connections with what has previously been learned. Reflection of where is the awareness that the learning situation can influence what is learned. The context can create space for different learning; for example, are the skills a student learns in a laboratory different from the skills learned in an auditorium even though the intention is to create the same skills? Reflection about how things are learned is self-reflection; the consideration of how to create the best space for one’s individual learning. It is the process of learning how to learn. Reflections about why you are learning are closely connected to creating meaning. You have to be able to see the relevance of what you are learning in terms of the meaning you ascribe to your own life; otherwise education will not create learning, except of the rote learning variety.

Habitus–reflection and curriculum development

The principle of habitus–reflection tells us that learning can be habitual for one student while reflective for another student. Some are in a situation where they do not know what they have learned (or if they have learned it), whereas others will be aware of their learning and will be able to discuss and contextualize their learning. The curriculum should be developed so that it facilitates reflection of habitual learning, because habitual learning without prior reflection is unfruitful as it difficult to transfer between contexts. Habitual learning without reflection, therefore, rarely forms the basis of competencies. On the other hand, it is important that learning becomes habitual so the student has a repertoire of actions that can be used in future situations withouttheneedforextensivereflection.Weexpectstudents tobeknowledgeableand to possess certain skills which can be immediately utilised when analysing and solving a concrete problem. No student will be regarded as competent in a given context if the student needs to go through long phases of reflection before taking action.

One way to deal with the progression from reflective learning to habitual learning is to formulate assignments that require students to work with theories and methods to either formulate or solve problems. Repeated use of theories and methods are important when learning habitual ways of coping with future situations. At the same time, it is important to stress that HE institutions cannot facilitate learning that is directly applicable in every context or future situation. This is one of the main reasons why reflective learning is so important. Reflective learning helps students to think about what, why, how and when they are learning, be it knowledge, skills or competencies. When developing the curriculum, reflective learning can be facilitated through group debates, panel discussions, group assignments and individual assignments. Again, the key purpose is to get students to objectify and negotiate their subjective meanings. In doing so, the student is forced to

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reflect upon the learning situation and future habits can be activated with a deeper awareness of situation, method and possible outcome.

Toil–exuberance

The principle of toil–exuberance comprises the general psychological principles of learning. It captures the fuel that makes the learning processes continue and start over and over again.

Learning through toil is when the learning situation or the syllabus gives rise to so many problems that the learning process is slow and difficult. The learner has to ‘mug up’ in order to learn and the subject matter includes what is sometimes seen as endless repetition.

Learning by exuberance is when experiments and enthusiasm carry the learner through the learning process. Sometimes the learner hardly realises that he/she is in a learning process, sometimes the learner is fully aware and reflective about the process. In younger children, play often comprises learning by exuberance. There is little attention to this kind of learning because the teacher does not have to intervene much in the process and the learning process tends to follow its own course. If the teacher is not open to this spontaneity and is unwilling to deviate from a previously planned path, the learning process can be transformed to a toil learning process. If the learners never get a chance to use their surplus energy, because the teacher insists, for example, on using a particular model and refuses even to consider the ideas of the students, this will frequently result in frustration or loss of interest.

There is thus a close connection between toil and exuberance. A learning process based on toil can be transformed to a situation of exuberance when the feedback process changes the way the learner understand the syllabus, and therefore gives the feeling of an accommodative jump. Conversely, exuberance can change to toil if the available skills and tools are not adequate to overcome a paradox, or when the context (the teacher, the materials, the instruments, etc.) limits the ambitions and desires of the students.

Toil–exuberance and curriculum development

The principle of toil–exuberance tells us that students have different levels of motivation and energy when entering into the learning situation. Some struggle through by sheer toil while others are carried through by the energy gained from exuberance. There is no direct relationship between the principle of toil–exuberance and the level of learning (habitus–reflection). Sometimes habitus learning brings the learner to a state of exuberance because the basis of the learning process is solid and leaves room for reflection. Sometimes habitus learning drains student energy and reduces of the learning process to sheer toil because it uses all the energy on boring processes of, for example, repetition. Hermansen (2005, p. 92) writes it this way: ‘When routine has reached a certain level, it potentially provides energy and exuberance to rise above the habitual element and in a reflective movement to adjust . . . a change of habits is necessary when the habits no longer match the problems they are to handle, but as there is toil connected to re-programming habitus, it naturally calls for resistance, more or less depending on personal robustness.’

In our work on curriculum development, the principle of toil–exuberance tells us that different assignments and teaching methods shift the state of toil and exuberance within individual students. It is therefore important to plan sessions where the students can discuss their own learning process with each other as well as with the teacher. It can be

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argued that just as feedback from other people is important in the process of meaning creation (feedback–feed-forward), teacher and peer feedback is also important for the motivation and energy level of the learner. Using facilities like the intranet makes it possible to develop a forum in which students can debate their learning processes and in which those students who are struggling can ask for clarification and guidance from fellow students, teachers, supervisors or coaches.

Reflective intermezzo

So what is the connection between the three principles of individual learning as formulated by Hermansen (2005) and the components of learning and the learning requirements of HE contexts as proposed by us? We see the principles of learning as a way of understanding the individual learning process and, through this understanding, to be able to develop better didactics and a learning-focused curriculum. Moreover it helps to discuss curriculum development at a time when curriculum is situated in many space and time contexts. The liquid modernity (Bauman, 2001) makes competencies central in the understanding of knowledge. The learner has to be able to use qualifications in new contexts in a way that is seen as competent. Society changes rapidly and the educational programmes should be aware of these changes. The learner is in his/her own time, with his/her own past (experiences) and own future (hopes and goals). The curriculum has to take the different ways of understanding the current time and make an advantage of them. Bauman (2003) use the term swarm to describe the social organisation of today—each member of the swarm can move in different directions at different speeds but the swarm as a whole is moving the same way. The learning process is situated in time and space. Individual learning spaces create the social context and the social relations of the learners embedded in that context. The relation between the principles of learning, the requirements of learning in HE and the components of learning is shown inFig. 1.

As it appears the learning process is a combination of three integrated cycles: (1) feedback–feed-forward, (2) habitus–reflection and (3) toil–exuberance. Whatever

Fig. 1 The individual learning process and learning requirements in the HE context

subject or learning project any student carries through in his/her life, the learning process itself is an integration of these cycles. In management education to be a professional student one needs to know theories, methods and practice. And one needs to possess knowledge, skills and competencies.

We see the understanding of the individual learning process as the way to (re)think the content of the learning space. How theories, methods and practices are connected to knowledge, skills and competencies depend on the swarm of directions in time (using a mix of experiences and notions of the future), of reflection levels and of different velocities. In curriculum development, it is necessary to think about these different aspects: first and foremost, are students moving from different starting points? Are they moving in different directions? Are they moving slowly? Are they moving quickly? Second, students need to learn to act (and react) in different ways in order to learn how to

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learn. Sometimes the learner needs to examine his experiences to solve a problem; sometimes he needs to examine his pre-understandings to understand how to solve a problem; sometimes he is working with another learner who is doing something different. Taken together, the different individual learning processes create the learning space in which the teacher has to build up scenarios that give students the opportunity to learn. In the next section, we describe the curriculum of a Bachelor’s degree course at Copenhagen Business School (CBS) which has been developed to focus on the learning process of the students.

Curriculum development in practice—the BETA course

Our case is the curriculum development of a 2½-year course in Business Economic Theory and Analysis in a new Bachelor’s programme in Business Administration and Organisational Communication (COM) which started in 2002 at Copenhagen Business School (CBS). The first cohort of Bachelors graduated in 2005.

We started the curriculum development of the BETA course in the spring of 2001 almost 1½ years before it was due to start. The question for us was: how do we best develop a curriculum which integrates theories, methods and practice and which, at the same time, enhances the professional development of students’ knowledge, skills and competencies? We formulated some important guidelines for our work:

1. The BETA course will be grounded in ongoing research from the teachers/ researchers involved in developing and teaching courses.

2. The BETA course curriculum will include current business practices.3. BETA students must take responsibility for and organise a part of their own

curriculum.4. BETA students must be able to apply theories, work methodically, reflect critically

and develop personal and interpersonal competencies.5. The BETA course is based on a pedagogy that is orientated towards practice.

These guidelines derived from view on contextual learning and from the requirements of learning at HE institutions (presented in Fig. 1). It made us think about the BETA course in terms of academic themes and learning processes rather than the syllabus and teaching. We developed five modules (one for each semester of the BETA course running from 1st to 5th semester of the COM study programme). The structure of the BETA course and the COM education is shown in Table 1.

COM is a full-time study programme and all courses take place at the Copenhagen Business School. In each semester students follow four to five courses simultaneously. The total workload of the BETA course is 31 ECTS: ECTS stands for the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System, which is a studentcentred system based on the student workload required to achieve the objectives of a study programme. ECTS is devised in such a way that 60 credits measure the workload of a full-time student during an academic year. The student workload of a full-time study programme in Europe amounts, in most cases, to around 1,500– 1,800 h per year. At CBS the full-time study workload is set to 1,800 h per year, which means that one ECTS equals 30 student working hours. In the Danish system this gives approximately 40 h of study per week.

The BETA course amounts to 930 student working hours over five semesters, of which 163 are face-to-face hours in the classroom. The remaining work hours are to be spent by the student on individual or group work within the academic domain of the BETA course.

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We will not go through all the course modules here, but will concentrate on the first module (three ECTS) and the second module (six ECTS). We can say, though, that there is one course coordinator responsible for the entire BETA course, and the same group of teachers is involved on all five semesters, so the other three modules follow the same pedagogical model as that described below. Module one—first semester

Instead of thinking only in terms of lectures and exercises, we planned the BETA course with different pedagogical activities in our repertoire. Thus, the BETA course starts with a mini-conference. The mini-conference runs over two weeks and represents the cornerstone of the BETA course when it comes down to integrating theories, methods and practice. The structure of the mini-conference is shown in Fig. 2.

We use the intranet facility named SiteScape Forum for online communication, file sharing, and academic debate within the group of administrators, teachers and students. We have created a special BETA portal. This is a combined learning approach, where our traditional face-to-face interaction during the face-to-face hours in the classroom is supplemented by face-to-interface interaction on an intranet. We have synchronous interaction in the classroom and asynchronous interaction in a dedicated on-line community on the intranet. Each morning at 5 a.m. the intranet automatically sends an e-mail in digest-format containing new headlines and relevant links to all new activities to all students. That is a way of continuously reminding the students of the BETA course and encouraging them to develop the habit of visiting the BETA portal each day.

We start our course in November. During October we upload a ‘call for conference papers’ for the mini-conference explaining the setup and the goals of the conference, as well as the requirements put on students in our SiteScape Forum. We

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123

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30

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Totalworkload30ECTS,

450

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450

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Integratedproject–6ECTS,180SWH–9ECTS,270SHW––Miniproject3ECTS,90SWH–––––Writinginprofessions–––3ECTS,90SHW––Academicwriting––3ECTS,90SWH–––

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ECTS,60SWH3ECTS,90SHW––––

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Societalanalysis8ECTS,240SWH–––9ECTS,270SHW–

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200

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Spring2004

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Autumn2003rdsemester

3

Spring2002

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Course1stsemester

CoursesandtheirECTSandSWH(studentworkhours)eachsemester

Table1

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Fig. 2 Module one—the mini-conference

also upload a 36 page manual explaining in detail how the BETA course is developed, why it has been developed in this way, what we expect of students, and guidelines for how they may or may not plan their own study process while attending the BETA course. We also describe the learning goals as well as the pedagogy behind the BETA course. The manual and the conference call provide a way to help students in their feed-forward processes and a way for them to tune into the BETA course. We also upload the reading list for the course and students have to buy, loan or download the appropriate titles themselves. The preparation for the miniconference requires individual work. It is traditional student preparation such as reading, writing and contributing in debates and discussions on the BETA portal. The individual work is mostly theory-driven and is assigned in order to develop individual knowledge and skills.

On the first day of the mini-conference two managing directors present the key challenges in business economics facing their companies. Their presentations are followed by a Q&A session with the MDs. Before the mini-conference begins students upload their questions for this session to the BETA portal. This is a demand made on students in order to facilitate their reading of academic literature in which theories on business economics are presented, to make them read the conference call, to encourage them to visit the homepages of the companies and read the annual reports of the companies. The students are expected to work together in groups of four to six in order to integrate theories and practice, which means that they must be able to argue for and reflect upon their own interpretations of both theories and practice.

The Q&A session itself is recorded on MP3 and uploaded on the BETA portal for the students to use in their forthcoming analysis of the companies and their challenges. Over the next 3–4 days the students work intensively in groups on their analysis, trying to find ways in which the companies can overcome their challenges.Such group work is assigned to motivate students to share their knowledge and demonstrate their skills and competencies to each other. Some of the miniconferences host

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a panel and others host a workshop. Our first mini-conference hosts a workshop—an entire day where students discuss their analyses of the challenges facing the companies with each other—and with their teachers who take the role of supervisors and coaches.

Based on the knowledge acquired from reading and discussing the academic literature, students train their analytical skills when they have to discuss their analysis with each other and with the teachers, and their writing skills when they have to write a five-page report where they explicitly use the acquired academic terminology to analyse the challenges of the companies.

Students upload their final reports to the BETA portal, and will either fail (and, therefore, have to resubmit) or pass the test. Teachers evaluate the reports based on the learning requirements in the HE context; that is, whether the reports demonstrate a competent use of models and theories, a competent use of research methods, and a competent analysis of empirical practice. The teachers each nominate two reports as the best reports and, from this pool of nominees, two winners are chosen. The following week the winning groups have to present their reports in a face-toface situation with the MDs, in front of the entire class. The MDs evaluate the presentations in terms of the way in which they meet the standards of performance required in their business contexts and, as such, whether students are seen as competent outside the academic context. Both teachers’ evaluations and the MDs’ evaluations provide important feedback to the students who are in the process of learning how to master a new academic field. Feedback from other people helps the student to create a subjective meaning of a situation based on their past experiences and their expectation of the future, and thereby helps them to be able to strengthen their own feedback processes.

The first time the students meet our teachers they are facilitators of a miniconference with representatives from one or two companies. It makes an enormous impact on new Bachelor students when the first people they meet in the Business Economics class are two MDs asking them to help them solve problems and overcome real life challenges. And the competitive element—winning one of the two slots where you can present your report to the MDs is a motivating factor as well. We try to motivate students and facilitate their development of knowledge, skills and competencies throughout the BETA course by varying the pedagogical tools used.

Module two—second semester

Again we use a variety of pedagogical tools on the second semester of the BETA course. We have a opening lecture followed by a workshop, then three lectures each followed by a discussion (note the ·3), then a mini-conference (this one with a panel session instead of a workshop), a lecture followed by a discussion, three lectures on management tools (two of them with time for discussions) and the semester ends with a 72-h case exam (Fig. 3).

In this, as well as the following semesters, the keyword is variation. The central element is the blended learning approach, where the BETA portal is used as the platform for asynchronous communication between students, between students and teachers, between students and administration. Throughout module two we have a

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Fig. 3 Module two—second semester

string of individual e-learning assignments which have to be solved individually by the students and uploaded to the BETA portal. The assignments pose both theoretical and methodological questions and require that students consider the implications of theoretical perspectives for business practice. The e-learning assignments also serve as an input to teachers’ preparation of the forthcoming class-based activity.

On the BETA course our lectures are not traditional lectures where teachers lecture from the textbook. The overall principle is not to waste students’ time by repeating information that they have already acquired from the textbooks and, possibly, transformed into knowledge. Lectures are, therefore, based on the premise that all students have completed their individual work before they attend the lecture, so the teacher does not repeat what is in the textbook. Instead the teacher is expected to put the central themes of business economics into perspective by giving concrete examples on how theory and practice is connected and then engage students in a debate based on their readings prior to the lecture. The debate may take its starting point in the uploaded e-learning assignments, in a real life situation, or in issues taken from the textbook. The thematic debate helps students perceive and experience the information they have acquired and transform it into reasoning.

Each lecture is followed by a discussion session where the e-learning assignments, the themes of the lecture, and the theoretical and methodological issues in the literature are discussed between teacher and students.

Module two also has an individual paper review, where students chose an academic paper (book chapter, journal article, research report), and write a review of that. We think that in order to be a qualified reader of academic literature, it is important that students try to deconstruct the arguments and compositions of such texts which is why we include the review session. Each student uploads his/her paper review to the BETA portal, where everyone can see all the reviews. They then choose a review written by another student and write an individual critique of that text. Teachers pass or fail both the review and the

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review critique of each student. In practice, teachers download the documents, write their comments into the documents, and upload the marked versions to the BETA portal. In this way each student gets immediate feedback from another student (or several students if more than one student chooses to give an individual critique of their review) as well as from the teacher. Feedback is an important mechanism in the learning process of students, and the academic online debates between students help them in their forthcoming group activities.

The centre of module two is another mini-conference, based on the same principles as the mini-conference in module one. There is one important difference, though, which is that the workshop is changed to a panel session. Here six to eight representatives from different companies participate in a 4-h Q&A session, where groups of students interview them about themes central to the case company which has presented their challenges on the first day of the conference. Each group of students gets 30 min with a company representative before they move onto the next company representative, and so on. In this way students are required to explain the core themes and challenges of the case company to each company representative, and to interview the company representative about similar themes and challenges they have experienced in their companies. Afterwards, the group of students has to be able to translate the input from the series of interviews into usable input for their analysis of the case company. This is a format that requires knowledge of theories and methodology. It requires methodological skills to master such sessions in a competent way, and it requires competent understanding of the relation between theory and practice to be able to master a string of meaningful dialogues with six to eight representatives from different companies over a 4-h session. Again, we train students in explicit coupling of theory and practice, in a way that requires reflection and the activity is organised so that they get immediate feedback from company representatives. Such panel sessions (as seems to be the case with all our miniconferences where practitioners are involved) produce a state of exuberance in most students.

Module two ends with three sessions on management tools where students are presented with concrete tools that can be used in a normative way when managing companies. The tools we introduce vary from year to year but usually fall into the categories of HRM tools, accounting tools, and communication tools. We include tools to help students develop theoretical and methodological skills in addition to their theoretical and methodological knowledge. We have asked business practitioners and key researchers to participate in these sessions to demonstrate how they use the tools in their companies or in current research.

We end module two with a 72-h case exam, where groups of students write a 15-page report based on their analysis of a large and complex case study. We gather approximately 250–300 pages of information about a company and its business relations and ask the group of students to act as a consultancy company. The assignment is to make a theoretically based and methodologically sound analysis of the challenges facing the company and to provide the company with a recommendation for future business. We evaluate the reports based on the requirements we have formulated for students’ mastery of an academic profession. Does a report demonstrate: (1) a competent use of models and theories? (2) a competent use of research methods? and 3) a competent analysis of empirical practice? If it fulfils these three criteria it will pass, otherwise it will fail. Although the reports are written by groups of students, we arrange oral exams where students defend their report and its conclusions individually. We do this in order to be able to give a fair evaluation of each student’s knowledge, skills, and competencies. We

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evaluate knowledge of theories and methodologies, we evaluate their skills in a discussion about their choice of methodology employed in the analysis, and we evaluate their competencies within the academic field as an overall evaluation of their written report and oral performance.

Conclusion

In this article, we have shown how curriculum development and students’ learning processes are closely related. We have argued that the development of a learningcentred education has become increasingly important as the tasks, roles and identities of the modern worker have changed with the introduction of new technologies and the establishment of the knowledge economy. We have presented the case of the BETA course in the COM study programme at CBS, which is rooted in a contextual learning paradigm centred on the learning processes of the students. Our pedagogical activities are planned within the framework of contextual learning, where we see the learning process as an integration of feedback and feed-forward, habitus– reflection, and toil–exuberance. Our aim is to facilitate the students’ development of knowledge, skills, and competencies within the framework of academic professionalism which requires: (1) a competent use of models and theories, (2) a competent use of research methods and (3) a competent analysis of empirical practice.

We have endeavoured to explain and describe how and why we developed an overall structure and a variety of underlying synchronous and asynchronous activities in order to put an explicit focus on different forms of student learning at different points in time.

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