The University of Idaho College of Business and Economics is re-structuring the Integrated Business Curriculum business majors take during their junior year, said Jeff Bailey, interim associate dean.
“From the student’s prospective, it’s a better sequencing of the content,” Bailey said. “They’re going to hear the same stuff.”
John Lawrence, a professor of business who was involved in the re-organizing process, said the change is intended to make the program more scalable.
“It was a process of looking at IBC and saying ‘is there a way to deliver this that’s a little bit less resource intensive,'” Lawrence said. “And that really came out of the president’s goal for the university to grow the student body. So we could teach more students if the number of faculty grew at a rate slower than the number of students.”
IBC sections are currently taught by teams of five faculty, with 60 students who move through the 17-credit program together, staying with the same instructors through both semesters.
“What we’re trying to do in that arrangement is help students understand how business operates and the basics of business in an integrated manner,” Lawrence said. “Most business schools teach introduction to marketing, introduction to finance, and so forth. And we more deliver it in terms of this integrated model.”
The students work on group projects all connected to one case company, Lawrence said.
“Faculty get to know students, students get to know students better,” Lawrence said. “It’s intended, in part, to have a much more collaborative learning environment.”
Bailey said the program is unique, and other universities have visited UI to learn about it.
“IBC has won us college awards,” Bailey said. “When we were accredited by AACSB (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business), we got national best practices awards, and one specifically for IBC.”
Bobby Harryman, UI junior in marketing-PGA with a golf course management emphasis, said the projects are built around oral presentations and papers — some written from presentations.
“So you get your information from the presentation and you write it out as like a business proposal, or something like that,” Harryman said. “You’ll be assigned a group at the very beginning, and you’ll do a project, and so you’ll have to give an oral presentation to the class for about 20 minutes or so.”
The groups change for each project, giving the students the chance to meet more of their classmates.
Lawrence said certain faculty were more connected to some subjects and not others in the first and second semesters.
“We said ‘what if we rearranged IBC,'” Lawrence said.
They grouped the subjects so that each semester would have a certain emphasis that would only need to be taught by groups of two and thre faculty members.
The first semester will cover finance, management and information systems, and the second will focus on operations and marketing.
“So now what you have in the first semester, students will see essentially a team of three faculty members teaching,” Lawrence said. “On day one of IBC, they will still walk in and meet all five faculty, but then that first semester they’ll be seeing daily the finance, management and IS faculty, and rarely — if ever — see the operations and marketing faculty.”
The faculty will reverse for the second semester. The change leaves two smaller teams that are free on their off semester to do more research, he said. They will still be in contact with the course, but without the teaching responsibility.
“To facilitate that, we’ll be moving small amounts of content between modules to make that work,” Lawrence said. “So for example, there was in Business 342, in the Product and Process Planning, there were a couple of days worth of finance and so we’re moving that finance to one of those courses in the first semester.”
Bailey said students won’t notice a big change, and it will be the same class they had heard about from upper-classmen.
“We still meet three hours a day, three times a week,” Bailey said. “We still have projects and team work.”
Joanna Wilson can be reached at [email protected]
Ricky Scuderi | Argonaut
Finance major Lindsay Beresford and accounting major Michael Norby work on a project that is part of the Integrated Business Curriculum program in the Student Union Building Monday. The College of Business and Economics made changes to the IBC program recently to accomodate more students.