Ok, another meeting, another set of notes.
We’d already established that the students weren’t going to take specific roles within the groups for the unit, but to ellaborate we are now looking towards having them all go off and investigate, then come back together and collaborate as a “collective intelligence”.
I mentioned a concept to I had seen in a talk by Randy Pausch (an amazing man who I wish I had the opportunity to meet before he sadly passed away) whereby the students rate each other based on how well they feel they performed in the tasks they undertook during the week. This feedback would then be graphed and illustrate how well a student has performed in the eyes of their peers, acting as a motivational tool to get the students to pull their weight.
We decided it might be better to get rid of the “stop the rot” paper as this would essentially only be tacked onto to produce the final report. Instead of the paper, there will be a non-assessed briefing to the consulancy director(s) possibly via conference call whereby the students can present what they have learned so far and gain feedback and direction.
We talked about the need for some sort of primary data from the customers and how to include this. We’re thinking of supplying students with some rather dated, limited market research. This would then possibly be supported by a forum on which there is negative feedback about the company and it’s products or perhaps some other form of feedback the students can access, this is yet to be nailed down.
We identified that the students need to follow the process of “get info – identify the question – ask the question – get the answer – make recommendations” with each of the issues we present them with and we need to identify methods of guiding them through this without holding their hands.
The SWOT analysis is coming along, with the Threats and Weaknesses aspects identified as these can pretty much apply to any industry. The Skills aspect really needs to be informed by the business and the Opportunites are the area we can really tailor ourselves.
We thought about the way in which we will monitor the progress of the different groups and keep them moving without necessarily having to have them meet with Simon or one of his colleagues. We’re thinking of using a short, weekly progress report which will outline the progress made over the last week, problems that cropped up and what they aim to achieve over the coming week.
In support of the idea of “collective intelligence” it was thought that we could have some sort of forum within the consultancy site, for the module as a whole. The problem with this being that as all groups are working on the same business, I think it would break the suspension of disbelief.
Posted by craigharkness 
