Teaching Cambridge A-Level Business Studies: Class Activity 1

Students are broken up into groups of 3 or 4.  Then each of them will receive one of the challenging full 20 marks questions from Section B of Paper 1 of Business Studies past year exam.  They are later required to elect a representative to come forward to the class and make a presentation on the following.

• Identify the keywords in the question; students must show in their presentation what are the important keywords that the other students need to include in the writing of their answers.
• Outline of ideas and structure of writing
• Elaboration - how they can link their ideas to other concepts and theories; how can they provide a detail discussion
• Conclusion

Questions for class discussion and presentation:

1. "Because there is conflict between profit and corporate social responsibility (CSR), private sector businesses should not have CSR as an objective." Do you agree? Justify your view. (20 marks) [9609/11/M/J/16]
2. "The most effective way to realise human potential in a manufacturing busienss is to give high rates of financial rewards to the workforce." Do you agree? Justify your view. (20 marks) [9609/13/M/J/16]
3. Discuss the view that employee participation is not always desirable in the management of a profit maximising business. (20 marks) [9609/13/M/J/16]
4. "In a business organisation, having an effective leader is more important than having an effective manager."  Do you agree? Justify your view. (20 marks) [Self-created question]

The above questions covers Unit 1 and Unit 2 of the AS Business Studies syllabus.

Technology for Innovative and Interactive Marketing

Coca cola Creates First Ever Drinkable Advertising Campaign (2015)

Coca-Cola Small World Machines - Bringing India & Pakistan Together (2013)

Chinese E-commerce Grocer Yihaodian & O&M Advertising Shanghai's 1,000 Virtual Stores App Case Study (2013)

Emart Sunny Sale Campaign - 3D Shadow QR Code

Zugara's Augmented Reality & Motion Capture Shopping App (2009)

FXMirror_3D Virtual Fitting Solution (2015)

Augmented Reality Cosmetic Mirror CScout Japan 1 (2013)

Sephora Virtual Artist App 

Place IKEA furniture in your home with augmented reality (2013)

Technology and Business: Drone Delivery

USE OF DRONE DELIVERY SERVICE BY AMAZON.COM

Video: Amazon Prime Air (2013)

Video: Amazon Prime delivery drones might be docking on lamp posts, power poles, cell towers - TomoNews (2016)

Ask yourself how the application of this technology will affect the operation of the business.  Students in Business Studies should be able to think of the benefits that can be reap with the use of such technology.

DOMINO PIZZA AND ROBOT PIZZA DELIVERY

By the way, Domino is attempting to implement a robot pizza delivery service.

Video: Domino's Using a Robot to Deliver Pizza in Australia - IGN News (2016)

Here is a video of how Coco-Cola take advantage of this drone technology and use it as a part of its marketing campaign.

DRONE FOR COCA-COLA MARKETING CAMPAIGN

Video: #CokeDrones by Coca-Cola Singapore & Singapore Kindness Movement

Teaching Academic Skills: Designing the Content Outline

How to make the class more interesting and less technical and dry?
Introduction - knowing what are the students initial academic qualification before undertaking the degree course, where do they come from, and what are they working as.
Explain how the study of degree level may differ from diploma
Understand about Higher Order Level thinking; differentiate among Knowledge, Understanding, Analysis, and Evaluation criteria in assessment (Next day: Have students refer to the Bloom's taxonomy*) - get students to create questions that reflects these criteria

Understand the different learning styles and the approach to optimize learning
Understand there is no such things as learning styles as there are merely myth; relate this to critical thinking 

Plagiarism and academic dishonesty - know the different types of plagiarism; know the consequences of plagiarism; talk about unintentional plagiarism; show examples of "copy and paste" work; display some of the Turnitin report
References and Citations - state that despite giving proper citations and referencing like putting the quotation signs on a large parts of another author's writing you have used to present your report may fail to show originality in writing; include explanation on the sources of information and their respective quality
Paraphrasing and Summary - do an exercise on paraphrasing and summary; give students the sample answer; make reference to the Success of Starbucks in China
How to become a better students  refer to Tedx Video
Time Management - personal "kanban" system; talk about include activities that you enjoy doing and to slot in time for rest and leisure



Note Taking - different method of note taking; mind-mapping; concept-mapping; explain how mind mapping can also be used for planning purposes; know that your mind-map is a personal thing (others will have difficulty to comprehend); talk about building mental hook; show how mind-map can exercise your brain to analyse better

*For myself, understand how Bloom's taxonomy is applied to the setting of examination question

Knowledge
Understanding - explain how students can have knowledge and no understanding; make reference to marketing example of the "Kitchen Utensil Manufacturer"
Analysis - what does it mean by going "deep"? how can we facilitate our thought process to analyse (ask more questions?); show how analysis is made through the display of mind map and the different branch level; finding similarities and differences - do the exercise on finding the reasons for Wal-mart to fail in Germany, Japan and South Korea
Evaluation - looking at the pros and cons of things; making critical comparison especially when certain theories and practices are applied to different contexts; understanding the extent of usefulness of certain theories and practices 

Have a realistic expectation that the students will need more exposure in their academic endeavor to understand the teaching in Academic Skills as they have be exposed to the situations in other class learning in which the knowledge acquired from academic skills have to be applied.

Teaching is Theatrical Act

Teaching to me can be conceived as a theatrical act. As an actor on stage needs to know the line, we as educator needs to know the content of our teaching.  However, the difference in theater are the actors must follow lines exactly.  But in teaching, we are given latitude to create, add, and innovate the delivery.  Yet we can appreciate the common characteristics of both theater and teaching as where these two often works for the purpose of capturing the audience attention.

To me personally, teaching can be a comedy.  We should or need to interject humor to make the class interesting.  By increasing a sense of arousal, the information delivered can hopefully be effectively stored in the memory of the target students.  I can't exactly remember from where I have gotten the information but there is someone or some article that states that by being able to shift the students to a different context on how certain concepts and theories can be applied allows them to remember better and they can create more ways to make association.  By giving this opportunity for students to associate with something which is humorous, we can provide further "hooks" which they hang their learning onto.

Although some may argue that the approach of using humor depends on personal style of teaching delivery)

My Process of Teaching A-Level

In my process of teaching A-Level, I don't use any slides and prefer to write the notes on the whiteboard or dictate the ideas of understanding certain topics and answering past year questions to the question.  There are pros and cons to such an approach.  The pro is that I will not be restricted to the information presented on the slides.  The second benefit is that I do not have to spend time to construct the slides and use this time to focus on writing sample answers for analysis and discussion which I feel will have more impact.

One reason for my my aversion of using slides is that students may not often write their notes down.  Personally, I believe when writing the notes on the whiteboard it will force the students jot down the note and thus help to reinforcement their learning.  Yet in this day and age of modern technology, some students would most likely take a snapshot of what is written on the whiteboard than to spend time taking down the information onto their notebook.  I do allow this because I understand that at certain occasions and for certain people, it takes time for time write the notes into their notebook.  Nevertheless, I see the act of actually copying the notes and taking snapshot of the notes elicit some form of active participation.  However, the effectiveness of such action needs to be assessed.  Will probably need to do some reading on education psychological article of how useful is such approach?  I do believe some will argue that how effective will note taking and taking snapshot of the things the lecturer has written on the white board will strongly depends on individual on what will they do afterwards.

The other problem that the use of slides may result is during the assessment they may merely just look at the slide information rather than reading the textbooks or relevant articles to prepare themselves. I think whether this is useful will depends on the nature of the assessment.  If it is highly open-ended and demands some creative thinking on the student parts, then reference to slides will limit their ability to answer the questions competently.

Though in some occasions, I do use slides to teach some other subjects.  I find this can be highly essential when students want (or demands) for a more structured learning.  However, I would always remind myself and attempt to make the teaching interesting by engaging in a multimedia approach, meaning I would also show videos or provide students with articles such as from The Economist to refer and discuss rather than merely referring to the slides.