Making Teaching and Learning a Collaborative Process by Adopting Research Informed Teaching on Executive Education Programmes
Authors: Grishikashvili Ketty 
Published: November 2024

In a current, fast changing digital environment, the fact how fast business market is changing and how society’s perceptions evolve to become more inclusive and diverse in terms of viewpoint, and overall workforce composition is a strong indication that the education system also requires a change. To remain relevant, business and management education must reflect the realities that influence its subject matter, while at the same time addressing societal needs and expectations. Especially on the Executive Education (EE) programmes, which are driven by changes in technology, the marketplace, and the demand of individual organisation for organisation change, business schools are expected to do more than simply disseminate knowledge. Having learners or clients who are coming from a diverse range of background, who are bringing a variety of learning styles, abilities, and rich learning experience is a challenge to satisfy all stakeholders. Thus, in those programmes where we are trying to bring academic rigour and real-world experience to scale up businesses and help them growth, some innovative and inclusive ways of teaching, learning and assessment are very important to ensure learners’ personal and professional development and to demonstrate a real-world impact for those involved. This article presents a reflective analysis of introduced innovative learning, teaching, and assessment methods for one of EE programmes in one of the UK’s higher education institutions. The innovative methods employed in this course were to address the above-mentioned challenge, to demonstrate a real-world impact for those involved, in addition to ensuring learners’ personal and professional development by making teaching and learning a collaborative process. This was achieved by incorporating an active and action learning strategies in flipped classroom settings. More specifically this was achieved by introducing all elements (research led/tutored teaching, research oriented or research based) of research informed teaching, which focused on real-life problems that client companies are or were facing instead of traditional case study approach. Effectiveness of this approach was acknowledged by both colleagues, who were involved in teaching and supervisory activities and learners. Colleagues reported that learners seemed to be more enthusiastic and attentive in classes after introducing this practice. On the other hand, learners indicated that having an opportunity to work with or supervised by research active staff encourage them to conduct their own research with high quality manner. In addition, it has been observed that this practice also worked well in supervisor-learner engagement and engagement with the material especially in the flipped classroom settings. Effectiveness of the introduced methods and recommendations are based on learners’ feedback and the secondary data that demonstrates the impact for the client organisation. As this study was taken purely for the pedagogical reasons and is not conceived as pure research, at this stage study didn’t go through the ethics approval, which is an acknowledged limitation of this study, however there is an intention for farther developing this limitation to strengthen the research findings and recommendations.