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The purpose of this manuscript is to highlight how gamification is transforming recruitment, retention and training to resolve employee engagement challenges in the ever-changing workplace. In collaborating with game industry experts and designers, the authors taught students team leadership skills by demonstrating how to design and play their own original cooperative strategy games. In doing so, students learn what gamification is and how it can be used to train our multigenerational workforce; how designing board games teaches team leadership skills (e.g. communication, conflict management, power, decision-making); and how to develop cooperative strategy game elements (player characters, roles and actions) that motivate engaging gameplay with successful learning outcomes.

In this paper, the authors discuss the practical implications of a three-phase semester-long experiential learning experience, where game design demonstrates to students how employees can work collaboratively together in teams. Students’ developed storylines (i.e. strategic objectives) including motivation challenges, social media communication breakdowns, sabotage, global sustainability and other real-world challenges. In Phase 1, students learn about how companies are using gamification in training high-performing teams. In Phase 2, students play a cooperative strategy game Forbidden Island with their student teams. In Phase 3, students design (and play) their original cooperative strategy game, instructions booklet and build a facilitation guide.

Approximately, 400 students developed 48 original cooperative strategy games that can be used to teach team leadership skills. These student teams designed cooperative strategy board games – in which the entire team either wins or loses based on their control of valued resources and player actions as key decision-making points. The data and feedback indicate that the learning experience helped them practically consider team interdependence in making effective decisions, and in creating creative self-efficacy, resilience and self-confidence in their own leadership voice. In this manuscript, the authors focus on providing an overview and implementation plan for our semester-long experiential learning exercise.

This experiential exercise was implemented from 2019 to 2023 in different learning modalities (face-to-face, hybrid, 100% synchronous online learning) and during challenging times (prepandemic, pandemic and postpandemic learning environments). These varying experiences provided them with a challenge to persevere and learn about their own interpersonal skills and resilience in a creative engaging way with limited resources. Students developed 26 original games during 100% synchronous remote learning due to COVID. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no other business school is working with gaming industry experts and game designers to teach team leadership to this degree during pre- and postpandemic environments.

The purpose of this paper is to present The Build and Bond, an experiential exercise which engages student teams while they apply team dynamics, enhance team skills and foster team member interpersonal bonds.

During The Build and Bond, teams design and execute their own team-building activity. Specifically, teams set goals, generate ideas, make decisions, create a team-building activity, develop implementation plans and ultimately execute the activity. Finally, during an all-class debrief discussion, teams describe their team-building activities, connect their experiences to the learning objectives and reflect on how these lessons can be applied in future team experiences. Pretest and posttest surveys were used to determine if participants perceived increases in team performance and cohesion following The Build and Bond.

All teams reported that their activity added value, was preferred over an instructor-assigned team-building activity and improved team states. Findings from t-tests supported an improvement in team performance and cohesion.

The Build and Bond is designed to help students feel more equipped to communicate, have fun and work interdependently with current and future team members.

Teams design the team-building activity themselves, so members are often more interested in participating and engaging during the team-building activity.

Collaboration between universities and industry is increasingly perceived as a vehicle to enhance innovation. Educational institutions are encouraged to build partnerships and multidisciplinary projects based around real-world open problems. Projects need to benefit student learning, not only the organisations looking for innovations. The context of this study is a multidisciplinary innovation project, as experienced by the students of an University of Applied Sciences in Finland. The purpose of this paper is to unfold students’ conceptions of the learning experience, to help teachers and curriculum designers to organise optimal conditions and processes, and support competence development. The research question was: How do students in higher professional education experience their learning in a multidisciplinary innovation project?

The study took a phenomenographic approach. The data were collected in the form of weekly diaries, maintained by the cultural management and social services students (n=74) in a mandatory multidisciplinary innovation project in professional higher education in Finland. The diary data were analysed using thematic inductive analysis.

The results of the study revealed that students’ understood the learning experience in relation to solvable conflicts and unusual situations they experienced during the project, while becoming aware of and claiming their collaborative agency and internalising phases of an innovation process. The competences as learning outcomes that students could name as developed related to content knowledge, different personal characteristics, social skills, emerging leadership skills, creativity, future orientation, social skills, technical, crafting and testing skills and innovation implementation-related skills, such as marketing, sales and entrepreneurship planning skills. However, future orientation and implementation planning skills showed more weakly than other variables in the data.

The findings suggest that curriculum design should enable networked, student-led and teacher supported pedagogical innovation processes that involve a whole path from future thinking and idea development through prototyping to implementation planning of the novel solution. Teachers promote deep comprehension of the innovation process, monitor and ease the pain of conflict if it threatens motivation, offer assessment tools and help in recognising gaps in individual competences and development needs, promote more future-oriented, concrete and implementable outcomes, and facilitate in bridging from innovation towards entrepreneurship planning.

The multidisciplinary innovation project described in this study provides a pedagogical way to connect higher education to the practises of society. These results provide encouraging findings for organising multidisciplinary project activities between education and working life. The paper, therefore, has significant value for teachers and entrepreneurship educators in designing curriculum and facilitating projects. The study promotes the dissemination of innovation development programmes in between education and work organisations also in other than technical and commercial fields.

This paper aims to address the long-standing problem of suboptimal student team experiences for instructors and students by incorporating the student voice by co-creating a virtual team collaborative environment to improve team collaboration in the online classroom.

This paper presents a novel design science research approach and relates two elaborated action design science research (eADSR) cycles that design, implement and evaluate the student team experience in online courses requiring teamwork.

The outcome is a holistic view of a virtual team classroom environment specified with technologies and practices that may be employed to optimize the student team experience. The eADSR process yields non-obvious diagnoses and actionable steps for continually incorporating the ever-changing social aspects unique to students in addition to the evolving technological landscape.

This paper is valuable to faculty members interested in applying eADSR processes to incorporate the student voice to address pedagogical and learning challenges in the classroom. Additionally, it provides a DSR-based model that can be implemented in the classroom to improve student team collaboration as well as transparency for the instructor and the students in terms of team member contributions with the goal to alleviate student and faculty frustrations. This topic is particularly relevant in light of COVID-19 as students and faculty alike are thrust into new online classroom environments.

Employing eADSR in the classroom is a novel and unique approach to create a replicable model for virtual team collaboration that can be added to the classroom.

This uses quantitative and qualitative methods in assessing performance and process outcomes in a team lecture hybrid (TLH) instructional design applied in a public affairs course.

Within a non-experimental prospective design, individual and team outcomes were assessed as follows: survey of student perceptions of learning outcomes; comparison of individual and group scores on in-class case analyses using paired t-tests; external reviewers' observations of traditional lecture versus TLH activities; and analysis of students' reflections on team dynamics using a team process reflection tool adapted from four team development stages.

The following student learning outcomes results were observed: increased use of critical thinking; higher student interaction with other students and the instructor; higher student engagement in initiating or contributing to content or other learning activities; higher student enthusiasm; increased use of problem-solving skills; improved performance evidenced by quality of individual versus group products; evidence suggesting improvements in student learning outcomes when active learners and an active instructor interact in a learning environment.

Instructor practice tips were provided in the following areas: use of assessment methods; student engagement as an active instructor; motivational tips for classes with students from a variety of disciplines; and individual team member accountability.

This paper contributes to the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) by addressing limitations in both traditional and collaborative learning models and expanding holistic evaluations in SOTL.

This paper aims to provide instructors with a hands-on engaging and experiential class activity designed to teach undergraduate and graduate students about different organizational structures in management courses. Through this exercise, students will be able to self-identify the challenges and strengths of working under contrasting organizational structures.

Split into two (or four) teams, students construct origami animals based on their team’s organizational structure, using both mechanistic and organic structures to create a zoo based on a set of instructions and boundary conditions. Materials required include origami paper, markers, printed instructions, origami animal instructions, and role title cards for each student. The exercise takes approximately 30–45 min, including debriefing discussion. All materials/instructions needed are included with this paper (except origami paper and markers).

Through this exercise, students internalize the challenges and strengths of working in organizations with contrasting structures. The debrief discussion will help solidify student understanding of what the day to day experience of working in different organizational structures might look like, the pros and cons of different structures, and what type of employees or industries might thrive under different structures.

This paper is being submitted for the “Special Issue Call for Papers: Modern Day Experiential Exercises.”

This activity allows students to draw their own conclusions about organizational structure and to engage in a fruitful discussion about what working at different types of organizations looks like on a day-to-day basis.

This activity allows students to strengthen their skills in communication, teamwork, and leadership by having them work in teams to complete a challenging, competitive task.

While teaching organizational structure in management courses has traditionally been limited to traditional forms of instruction such as lecturing and reviewing different organizational charts, this activity gives students a fun competitive in-class activity in which they practice working as a part of contrasting organizational structures to see what type of structure they might thrive in.

The implementation of project-based learning (PBL) activities in the curricula of engineering students has become a consolidated method to improve their skills. The purpose of this paper is to share the experience acquired by the authors from a decennial case-study on a student team PBL activity focused on design and development of human-powered vehicles (HPVs). A review of the project evolution, boundary constraints and management choices could provide inspiration and suggestions to faculty staff that would like to set-up similar experiences for engineering students in their universities.

A student team was funded by the authors in 2008 to gather engineering students interested in design and construction of HPVs. In the past decade, the team has grown from 10 up to 60 students enrolled per year and stimulated to develop a range of HPV designs for sports and mobility. The project management evolved as a consequence to com ply with the growing ambitions of the group and complexity of the goals.

A thorough analysis of factors contributing to the success of the project led to identification of the key factors to increase student participation: persistence of the faculty staff is essential, attending competitions and challenges increases students’ recruitment and formal recognition of the activity through credits and the implementation of intermediate assessment steps increase the active participation rate. Bigger teams reduce the negative impact of recruits eventually abandoning the project in an early stage. Ambitious goals keep students motivated for longer periods and enable a virtuous circle by transferring enthusiasm and knowledge to new members.

The activity is analyzed starting from a subjective experience perspective and some of the findings/conclusions may be not applicable in a different context. However, such review can suggest strategies on the long-term period to create similar conditions elsewhere.

In the last part of the paper, it is pointed out how PBL projects can provide a fertile ground for innovation and lead to patents and development of new products aiming at the market.

This study contributes to provide an insight view of how a student team PBL activity can grow over a decade if guided by faculty staff.

This article demonstrates the implementation and efficacy of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) in an undergraduate entrepreneurship business planning course. Throughout the course, ill-structured problems arise that require independent thinking and ongoing problem solving with students taking responsibility for their own learning. The course incorporates the latest classroom technology and how that technology is utilized to deliver self-directed learning. The PBL methodology is then evaluated in light of anonymous student survey results. The objective is to create a framework for future assessment in evaluating PBL in the business planning course.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate an interdisciplinary system of targeted student supports, drawing from social and emotional learning (SEL), culturally responsive practices (CRP) and positive behavioral interventions and supports (PBIS). While these approaches are not often synthesized in research literature, innovative educators are integrating multiple theories and practices to achieve better outcomes for students.

The paper uses a descriptive, participatory case study method, including quantitative and qualitative data from a three-year period. The author was a participant in the change process, as well as an observer documenting the outcomes. The case study takes place in a Spanish/English bilingual elementary school.

PBIS was a strong influence in the three-year systems change process, due in part to the availability of free, research-based tools. The educators adapted PBIS practices to incorporate SEL, and CRP approaches in several instances. Quantitative data show the increase in PBIS implementation fidelity and one student’s progress with a targeted intervention. Qualitative data illustrate the creative, interdisciplinary and contextualized adaptations made by the team.

Guidance is available for educators seeking to implement SEL, CRP and/or PBIS approaches in isolation. To a lesser extent, integrated models are emerging in the literature. There is a need for more descriptive, real-world case examples of how these approaches are implemented and adapted in practice. This study provides educators with one example that can offer examples and implications for practice.

Given today’s pressing societal challenges, business schools are increasingly expected to incorporate sustainability in their curricula. Yet, while research on corporate sustainability is on the rise, there is less innovation in teaching methods as most institutions rely on traditional methods to teach sustainability in the classroom. This paper aims to present the case-based debate as an appropriate teaching method for exposing students to the complexity of business sustainability issues.

The pedagogical background of the traditional case method and the debate method have been analyzed to provide an integrated understanding of the benefits of combining the two in the case-based debate. Building on the authors’ experiences from using case-based debates in the classroom, the paper describes what a case-debate is and how it can be implemented.

The paper offers a practical tool that can be used to teach sustainability in business schools and other educational institutions. Case-based debates can elicit active participation, support the development of students’ critical thinking skills and improve reflexivity by compelling students to seriously and actively engage with opposing viewpoints on a given issue.

This paper presents a hybrid approach for sustainability teaching that combines the benefits of the traditional case method with those of an in-class debate. The case-based debate method has received little attention in educational research and business sustainability teaching practice but can serve multiple teaching objectives relevant to sustainability teaching.