Cal Poly Students Discuss Human Rights and China
January 30th, 2008
I have always said and tried to make crystal clear on the expectation front, that one gets out of on-line learning what they put into it. Good effort and reflection in, then good, self paced learning can take place. Poor effort in or no reflection, then don’t bitch about what what little one gets out of it.
Online learning, whether in a 100 percent distance format or a hybrid format — part face-to-face and part internet (this course is a very lightweight variation of a hybrid course), puts the onus on the student for that portion of their learning and requires them to struggle with connecting some of the dots.
I have found that merely suggesting at a place like Poly that a course be built with an online component often gets one “you are a child of satan” stares by a wide number of stakeholders. Yet, nobody wants to take on and discuss the true elephant in the room — that is, how, under the traditional model of a professor at the front of the room spewing knowledge while students furiously take notes trying to decipher what they will be tested on for the exam, the research clearly shows that student retention of said material where that is the mode of delivery is very, very, very low. But, I digress and hey, I will just have to accept that I won’t win a popularity contest on this issue in parts of Mustang Land (ironically, many companies today train their employees through different types of online learning and tools and one of the things I seek to do by using such a learning mechanism is to let students start to get comfortable with the very type of continued education and professional learning their firms will provide to them after they graduate).
One of the advantages of online learning in the form of a blog is that the student(s), through the posts they submit in a course like this, take ownership of and help design a part the content of the course and what they find interesting and relevant and what they want to discuss.
I have also found that in a traditional classroom setting you can’t easily replicate others in the world being a part of the learning process as you easily can with a blog and its asynchronous nature. On this note see the below post from the Corporate Social Responsibility in Asia blog that shows that people are interested in your work product and evaluating it (another reason I incorporate a blog into some of my classes is because I have found that transparency and public sunshine on things like work product are tremendous mechanisms that can separate contenders from pretenders).
My PhD student Rob Hanlon (doing his thesis on human rights, corruption, CSR and business) alerted me to this fascinating blog
. It’s run by [a professor] as part of his teaching in a business course and the lead up to an annual China trip by Cal Poly MBA students. As somebody who regularly gives talks to MBA students from various universities, I was intrigued by this post
Thank you, CSR in Asia, for the feedback. Please do check back in and let us know what you think of this comment stream. We welcome your constructive input, critique, expertise, and feedback, good or bad.
In a few weeks, I will publish Part II of this post, which will discuss how mainstream scholars look at and discuss human rights, so that each Cal Poly MBA and MS in IT student on the trip can go back, look at their own response, and see if they were in the right ballpark. Stay tuned.
Entry Filed under: Pre-Departure, Beijing, China
6 Comments Add your own
1. Pierre Michael | January 30th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
I agree that a lot of useful student learning happens independently. However, your comment seems to render teacher based learning as not very useful because students simply forget the material they’re taught. I completely disagree. While people can have discussions on an on-line blog, having discussions in a classroom can be significantly more engaging and interesting. Teachers today seem to act more as facilitators by providing students with the resources they need to educate themselves. So I agree that students end up with the onus of learning, but the role of the facilitator is rather important. This person distills all the important topics from industry, can be a source of inspiration, and can be a quick reference for providing answers that are hard to find.
…I like knowledge being spewed at me.
2. Chris Carr | January 30th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Pierre,
You raise a good point, and important distinction.
Facilitation, live or other, is important, and the research supports the value of that.
The research on the model of (even) the engaging, charismatic prof-lecture-notes-exam, however, is pretty damning in terms of student mastery and retention of content beyond the quarter or semester the class is taken in (i.e., where lecture and note taking is the sole or nearly exclusive mode of delivery). Where this model is coupled closely with another type of activity and learning, then the results are much better. In my own case, I really can’t tell you one thing I remember content wise from my undergraduate days at a decent school, which was traditional lecture (only) and midterm and final exam — and I was a good, diligent student in college!
3. Gary Chou | January 31st, 2008 at 2:28 pm
I think people learn better in different mode, but generally speaking, an inductive mode is better than a deductive mode. An inductive mode is defined by the expository, exploratory, i.e., students are led (induct) to derive conclusion, hence in the process, as Dr. Carr said, took ownership of the lesson learned.
I found Michael’s points not in contradiction to what Dr. Carr said in the original post. Lectures are mainly deductive learning–one-directional passage of knowledge of information–not a very effective learning method. What Michael pointed out was essentially in the spirit of Dr. Carr’s words: when classroom is combined with not just lecture, but also interactive activities, students are to learn better.
I find Cal Poly education extremely valuable because the emphasis on the application, aka do-by-learning aspect, as almost all my classes stress teamworks, projects, and practical skills. In summer courses, we attempted to commercialize real outside technologies, and presented to venture capitalists.
In accounting, instead of wasting time in lecture, we watch lecture at our own paces and utilize the valuable classroom time to doing actual cases and pick professor’s brain.
In business law, we studied 1000+ pages worth of cases; In Org Beh, every assignment is team based and in working with people we reflectively learned about our own behaviors. In all classes we learn about teamwork, collaboration, resource management, leadership, interpersonal skills….things that are actually useful in workplace, and incredibly beneficial for external motivators like myself.
In essences, I think I have learned more knowledges and common senses from half year at Cal Poly MBA than all my 18 years of formal education combined. Cal Poly also helped me to find the best job in the world, to compete with students from places like Berkeley and Michigan, and even quadrupled my salary in less than a year…I simply cannot praise more about the quality of our program and faculty, or express enough my indebtedness to this institute and the career service.
4. Chris Carr | January 31st, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Gary,
You get an automatic A and will graduate with honors. (Just kidding … you will still need to earn it.)
But thanks for the kind words. Our faculty, who work very hard, don’t hear kudos like this enough!
5. Simeon Trieu | February 1st, 2008 at 4:56 pm
Learn by doing. That’s for sure. Gary did a good job of summarizing my own thoughts about the Cal Poly system. I’ve done my undergraduate in computer engineering here at Cal Poly also. I’ve loved the system just as much as Gary has. Teaching yourself would not have been good for my undergraduate career, but in many laboratories, I was challenged to discover the principles of circuits under the guidance of the computer engineering faculty.
However, for business, it is extremely valuable to teach ourselves how to do accounting, finance, organizational behavior, economics, and myriads of other subjects because we are learning how to become masters of our subjects. I can tell you that learning how to do accounting is much easier than learning how to do microwave engineering. It is more feasible for me to learn on my own in subjects like business, where experience matters more than theory. It is expected of students in many other MBA programs across the country to do their own research in their field of interest.
Now, I understand that Prof. Carr has said this general management MBA is more like a super BS, as there’s not as much flexibility to specialize in a certain field (ie. study organizational behavior in great detail, as a focus of research). However, this program lets people, with little experience in business, have a shot at MBA level coursework without necessarily having a business undergraduate degree. I’m very grateful for that!
6. Rob Belloni | February 12th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
I’m always fascinated to hear what people think of the various learning modes offered to us during the MBA program at Poly (and in general).
Comments I hear range from, “I can’t stand these lectures” to “I can’t stand all these textbooks” and everything in between. To add to what Gary said, one of the big lessons I am learning along the way in this program is - what are my best learning modes? And how can I teach to people who have other learning modes?
I find the blog method very instructive. But I am also conditioned as a result of reading online forums for 12 years on a daily basis. Other people tell me the blog posts are too long or to dense. I can respect either view.
So to add some usefulness to this short post, I would like to offer some simple advice for anyone who does not like blogs as a learning method.
1. Keep your paragraphs short. If your typical paragraph has eight sentences, try using four.
2. Keep your sentences short. Short sentences are easy to read.
3. Use bullet points or lists.
4. Separate paragraphs with full carriage returns (hit the enter key twice).
5. Use Firefox, with the ’spell checking in forms’ option turned on. This saves time over spell checking in word, then copy-pasting.
6. I would advise using bold and italics, but find the allowed html in this blog a bit odd to use. Let’s try bold as a test and perhaps some italics.
-Rob
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