Design for Professional Responsibility & Business
Courses
BUS 101: Professional Responsibility and Business
BUS 302: Principles of Professional Responsibility
In the first-year course for students at the Gies College of Business, we designed a three-week module focused on applying the principles of empathy and iteration to students’ professional development. The content was taught to all 900+ freshman business students in the Fall 2020 semester. This collaboration grew from my broader first-year experience curriculum design efforts and provided a different model for how human-centered design could successfully enhance these courses. Our work here opened the door to wider collaborations with the BUS x01 sequence of required courses for business students during each year of the undergraduate experience.
Collaborating Instructors
Dr. Aimee Barbeau
Semesters
Spring 2020, Fall 2020
BACKGROUND
Building on the early success of integrating human-centered design into first-year engineering courses, I approached several other colleges at the University of Illinois about adapting this content into their course. Dr. Aimee Barbeau, the faculty instructor in charge of the first-year course for Gies College of Business was intrigued and asked if I would join her and curriculum designers from the Center for Innovation in Teaching in Learning in helping to reshape BUS 101: Professional Responsibility and Business. Rather than integrating design through a project in which student teams designed a product or service to address a need, we crafted activities that had students apply design thinking principles to their professional development. This content was inspired by Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans and tailored to the Illinois business student experience.
CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
Over the course of several weeks, we designed three weeks of activities that honed in on two key elements of design thinking: empathy and iteration. Week 1 had students reflect on their personal philosophies of why they want to work and why they are attending college and articulate these in a “work view” and “college view”. Independent reflection sets them up well for a discussion in class. In week 2 students shared their “work view “and “college view” with peers and iterated based on feedback. They then reflected on their resumes and what activities left them energized and engaged, considering how they personally added value while in each experience. These reflections were used to edit their resume to highlight activities they contributed value to and drew value from. This laid a foundation for elevator pitches crafted to prepare them for the career fair happening the next week. Week 3 had students craft three Odyssey Paths, a reflective tool in which they imagine three different versions of how their future could play out. These Odyssey Paths were also used in preparation for the career fair, as students were asked to select 3 different types of employers to talk with to explore multiple career paths. Two journal entries were assigned after the first three weeks of activities. The first journal had students reflect on their career fair experience and develop 3 mini Odyssey Paths, called Illinois Inquiries, which they wanted to explore during the remainder of their first semester. The second journal activity at the end of the semester had students create 3 Odyssey Paths for their next 5 years, reflecting on what they had learned in the course and what potential futures they imagine for themselves.
COURSE IMPLEMENTATION
Discussion sections of BUS 101 were led by upperclassmen facilitators and therefore it was essential we trained them on this new content. In the Spring of 2020, we led two training sessions in BUS 302: Principles of Professional Responsibility, the course all discussion leaders took to train them to lead sections in the fall. Over the summer of 2020, the lessons were adapted to function in a hybrid in-person and virtual format in response to the Covid-19 pandemic (with the use of innovative Covid-19 testing protocols on campus, many classes were able to have some in-person component). Many of the activities were redesigned in Miro, a virtual whiteboard tool. Overall the new content pilot was met with success, with the BUS 101 teaching team having every intention of continuing to utilize the content in future semesters.
Our efforts with BUS 101 started the conversation with the broader BUS x01 team (BUS 101, 201, 301, & 401). The business school was in the process of designing the connective tissue between these courses and there was strong interest in having a thread of design thinking throughout the sequence. The Odyssey Path tool was of particular interest to BUS 401 as seniors could reflect on whether they took the paths they expected when they were freshmen and also create new Odyssey Paths as they prepared to step into the professional world as graduates.