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Business schools need to prepare students for effective, ethical decision-making. When faced with stressful life events that negatively affect wellbeing, making decisions can become more challenging. As future managers, students will need to learn how to make decisions when they are at the same time faced with stress and cognitive overload. In such situations, the brain looks for mental shortcuts in making choices to make things faster and easier, which leads to less optimal decision-making. Research shows that mindfulness meditation can effectively decrease stress and anxiety. Mindfulness meditation increases metacognition and, in the process, reduces the effects of biases, ethical blind spots, and psychological traps. Therefore, introducing students to these techniques has significant pedagogical potential for business education as students learn mindfulness meditation and show a need to include such practices in the curriculum. This chapter sheds light on two mindfulness technique cases with business school students in Lebanon and Switzerland. In these cases, the authors explore the impact of mindfulness practices on students by applying the emotional intelligence mood metre and mindfulness meditation. The authors also apply the ‘response time testing’ (RTT) methodology in the Swiss case to measure students’ attitudes. As a result, the authors provide simple confirmations from their classrooms that engaging in mindfulness activities and meditation is a simple and productive exercise that is essential for student wellbeing, learning, and decision-making. Therefore, the authors’ purpose is to encourage and give mindfulness practices a viable place in business education.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate elements of socio-academic-related sustainability in educational institutes and propose a structure of an advising system that can aid the most critical stakeholders in such educational institutes, i.e the student. Hence, after reviewing the contemporary University Social Responsibility (USR) Venn diagram, the paper focuses on the need to develop a social and academic responsibility advisor (SARA) system as a catalyst toward fulfilling social responsibility to the most important stakeholder and alternatively leads to enhanced sustainability of such educational institutes.

A combination of research methods used in this paper, defined as by identifying the need for SARA from a literature survey. By distributing a questionnaire to students investigating their desire of an academic advisor system and by establishing a focus group to study the academic and social aspects and its implications to students’ “quality of life” as an essential aspect toward the educational institutes' sustainability. Various issues related to the features of the SARA discussed.

Literature review shows only a few articles combine both aspects of advising activities (social and academic), most of which are not interrelated to the sustainability of educational institutes. This paper highlights the need and connectivity of SARA to contemporary USR sustainability. The descriptive statistics of the questionnaire showed about 86 per cent of student participants interested in applying the proposed features. The outcome of the focus group resulted in more detailed features of academic and social aspects of the expected SARA system.

The proposed features of SARA described where the inter-related social and academic activities could be managed, logged and used by students. The proposed “heterogeneous study group” was investigated by observation implemented in four different courses in two different semesters. The result was not conclusive, and further study recommended. Even though this experimentation was not conclusive, the lesson learned from this study highlighted different issues associated with “study groups” within a course.

Applicability of SARA would enhance the quality of life of students in general and provide a mechanism to motivate low aptitude students to get engaged with study and projects with high-aptitude students.

Avoiding the “feel” of isolation by some students due to the inability to find study partner who can also act as mentor to a study group. The proposed “Heterogeneous study group” would provide a mechanism for “Practiced student-to-student Social responsibility”.

The paper highlights and proves the need for SARA in contemporary USR where SARA can act as a catalyst for enhancing the socio-academic zone of the reviewed USR Venn diagram. Features of SARA identified as an outcome of the study in this paper. Proposal of “Heterogeneous Study Group” was proposed as mechanism of “social learning”. “Group health” testing was proposed as a criteria resulted from a balance between collaboration, social affinity and project effort.