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The paper seeks to describe a collaborative matchmaking seminar that expands the role of academic librarians, and provides services with special benefit to first generation college students.

The conditions and rationale for the service, as well as the design and delivery components, are described.

First generation college students are challenged by gaps in their heuristic knowledge of “how” a capstone senior semester project works. Librarians are ideally positioned to collaborate with faculty to meet the information needs of these students.

This case study documents a successful approach to enlarging the role of librarians in contributing to student success.

Recounts a number of unmet needs at a university with heavy attendance by first generation college students that presented librarians with an opportunity for a natural and logical expansion of their roles as partners with faculty in student achievement.

This chapter explores how Clark University’s recent educational innovations in liberal education and effective practice (or LEEP) have led to a cultural shift in how “real-world,” “off-campus,” and “hands-on” experiences are viewed on campus. Instead of supplementing academic coursework, inquiry-based learning (IBL) opportunities that take place outside the classroom are being embraced as a fundamental mode of learning that animates what goes on inside the classroom. The goal is to engage students throughout their academic career by challenging them to take responsibility for connecting their learning through exploration, inquiry and by defining solutions to real-world issues. We connect IBL to the curriculum of one academic program, the entrepreneurship minor, to illustrate how a recurrent feedback loop emerges as the student moves through academic, co-curricular, and extracurricular experiences. We do this by mapping the student experience onto the curriculum and creating individual student pathways. With an emphasis on student-as-conduit, we demonstrate how non-course-based experiences can reinforce coursework, as well as how the curriculum can be responsive to the experiences of individual students.

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are a central backbone of (most) national economies. Research shows, that due to their smaller size, SMEs not only have comparatively less formalized, less complex, and less specialized organizational structures, but a somewhat different social character as well. It is in particular the interplay of these structural and cultural peculiarities of SMEs that is difficult to impart perceptibly in regular university courses on Small Business Management.

From a managerial science perspective, the structural as well as social characteristics of small non-profit organizations are quite similar to the above-mentioned features of SMEs. Both types of organizations usually function in a less bureaucratic and more personal way, while also being a bit more chaotic sometimes. In addition, both are often facing the challenges of severe resource scarcity as well as a lack of management competencies.

In view of these fundamental similarities between SMEs and small non-profit organizations, the practical seminar Service Learning Project was designed to provide management students at Europa-Universität Flensburg with the opportunity of experiencing typical small business work realities. Here, student teams support local non-profit organizations in meeting typical management challenges ranging from the conception and implementation of fundraising or image campaigns to internal consultancy projects. In this way, the seminar offers the possibility to deal with real-world practical management issues while concurrently strengthening students’ civic societal awareness, fostering empathy, and overcoming the oftentimes overly pronounced distance between science and life-world practice.

The role of social science in the curriculum of technical institutions of higher learning has always represented a series of tradeoff challenges and opportunities. Recently, issues to be addressed by those developing curricula for this audience have received increased attention. The difficulties that social and physical scientists have had collaborating on research projects have also been a matter of increasing attention and concern. Hence, to enrich this discussion we will offer a historical case study covering a 35-year (so far) experiment at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in which both organizational and educational issues had to be addressed as faculty members of both backgrounds worked with technical students on educational projects dealing with social issues.

For undergraduate students completing their senior seminar research, there is value in conceiving their study as a project. Research that is project-driven allows students to design the depth of their study with the target goal of degree completion and graduation. Fittingly, this chapter provides students with an applicable project performance strategy that works across academic disciplines and in tandem with the scientific research methodology. Along these lines, this work “connects the dots” between project performance and the student researcher’s capacity for investigative achievement. This notion of performance achievement capacity is referred to as research project performativity.

Accordingly, a blueprint for research project performativity is presented to show students a path to senior seminar success. To conclude, this chapter provides 10 useful tips to boost undergraduate student’s chances for surviving the experience of a senior seminar research.

The case study in this chapter is the Joint Community-based Project (code: JCP), a compulsory macro undergraduate course that is offered by the Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. The course was introduced to teach students the soft skills they will need as graduates and make them aware of their social responsibility. More than 1,600 students register for the course annually. Generally, students work in 450 groups each year to help more than 250 community partners. The course, which has received recognition at institutional, national and international levels, requires students to work in a community for at least 40 hours, after which they reflect on their learning experience through a report, presentation and YouTube video. The identification and selection process of community partners is based on contextual criteria, while new cohorts of students can recommend new community partners each year. Community partners’ tasks include project coordination and student assessment based on the course’s assessment criteria. This chapter discusses how community partners are identified, coordinated and sustained within a macro community service course. It also provides a conceptual framework to highlight community partners’ roles and their impact on the students’ social development based on qualitative case study research.

Partnerships and collaborative projects between universities and colleges in higher education have the potential to increase diversity in education and can prepare students for international experiences in the workplace. With this in mind and through the Erasmus plus program, this chapter sets out to discuss the collaborative project between Institute of Technology Carlow, Ireland and Satakunta University of Applied Sciences, Finland, with international business students. The academic objective of the project was for the students to research and compare the marketing of a similar product in both countries. Underpinning this was the objective of providing the students with experience on working online in international teams, and thus preparing them for their career in international business while further engaging them with the module content.

Many challenges were identified during and after the project was complete. There were communication issues and cultural differences identified throughout. From the lecturers viewpoint, there was a need for clear, concise, hands on instruction from start to finish.

These challenges, however, were outweighed by the many benefits to the project. This project offered the students and lecturers with the opportunity to network, learn, gain experience, liaise and collaborate with new cultures. It presented them with a chance to develop their knowledge on international business, culture and communication.

Laurea UAS, Lohja campus, in Finland, has a learning environment, Yrityslabra, for business management and administration students who want to complete their studies by doing real-life business assignments. This chapter depicts the elements of a physical learning environment that have contributed to improving learning results on Laurea Lohja campus. The campus was challenged with addressing long studying and graduation times, loss of students to other campuses, difficulties in employment after graduation and lack of cooperation between Laurea and organizations. To solve these problems, Laurea Lohja created a learning environment called Yrityslabra (Business Lab). As a result of the continuing development work and material gathered (interviews, memos from teacher development meetings, student evaluation discussions, and written evaluations), five distinctive elements for a learning environment were found. These elements are: informal physical environment, informal social environment, teacher’s role as a mentor, personal learning process, and project management process. As the result of the new learning environment, students on Laurea Lohja campus, for example, have shorter graduation times, and there are less drop-outs in the middle of the studies. Students also find work in their own field of interest and do so right after graduation. Also, there is increased interest for the graduating students to further their studies at the master’s level.

This chapter describes a student team project that involves the creation and delivery of a fundraising event business plan for a nonprofit organization. The project challenges students to become active learners and apply managerial accounting concepts associated with cost behavior, planning, and control in a realistic environment that sensitizes them to the missions of nonprofit organizations. It requires students to research and use real-world operational and financial information in a setting to which they can relate, and develops their understanding of how various business disciplines are integrated. We have used the project in introductory managerial and intermediate cost accounting courses to target specific core competencies identified as critical to a successful accounting career by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA).