Background

Management 310 (MGMT 310) is a required business course on organizational behavior. A variety of students enroll in the course; most are business majors in their junior year. When I first offered the course in Fall 2005, one of my observations was that many students failed to understand required readings before arriving at class, which resulted in unsatisfactory outcomes from team discussions and exercises. I had assumed that students would come prepared but found that I was covering basic material and not having enough time for applications.

I was interested in finding a tool to make sure students would come to class well-prepared, having mastered readings which would enable me to cover more complex materials and give students more opportunities to apply their knowledge to real life settings. I met with Professor Dan Bernstein at the Center for Teaching Excellence for consultation, and he introduced me to the EDU system. EDU is a web based computer software program that allows instructors to create before-class mastery-oriented on-line questions. The program essentially requires students to read assigned material and then answer the on-line reading consideration questions to check their understanding of it before they come to class.

Course goals:

• To understand and describe a variety of behavioral phenomena in organizations, including issues related to individual behaviors, interpersonal processes, and how organization context influences people’s behaviors.
• To apply knowledge of organizational behavior to actual situations. To analyze real-life situations by applying the behavioral knowledge from the course and to create action plans to improve the situations.