Three ways to ensure you are teaching for lasting societal impact

Business graduates are increasingly applying their knowledge to serve communities, as well as companies. 

Forward-thinking businesses and business schools have a wider focus than just financial performance, balancing profitability with long-term needs for sustainability and environmental and societal impact, while harnessing the positive benefits of new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI).

Business schools, therefore, must adapt and evolve their value propositions as business leaders’ responsibilities change if we are to prepare graduates for the new world of work. 

Senior leaders at business schools should recurrently review programme portfolios, teaching practices and methods of assessment to identify areas for growth and improvement. These efforts must be rooted in a clear mission and purpose to create socially, environmentally, economically and ethically conscious citizens who can have a lasting positive impact on the world. Let’s not forget that the long term always starts now. And the pace of change has hastened the arrival of the long term to closer to the near term. Here are four ways business schools can ensure they are applying this mission statement to their courses.

Create multidisciplinary learning experiences

Multidisciplinary collaboration and learning are crucial because most business problems and many of the world’s most urgent challenges are complex and cannot be solved by a single-discipline or functional approach alone.

To facilitate multidisciplinary learning, business schools that sit within wider universities must explore opportunities to collaborate with schools of science and technology, as well as social sciences, arts, design and humanities to form joint or combined programmes. Collaboration should not be limited to our own institutions and should include organisations, universities and businesses nationally and internationally that focus on relevant areas of expertise.

But, how can we visualise these collaborations?

Creating joint and combined degree programmes is one possible option. Courses that bring business, management and sciences or the arts together may initially be more difficult to arrange and cost a little more to deliver, but they also create more value for future graduates and enable them to thrive in their future careers. Courses in international business also offer natural opportunities to be combined with subjects like modern foreign languages, offering a deeper understanding of how cultural factors interact with business. 

The inclusion of collaborative online international learning (COIL) within courses can also be suitable to enhance the breadth of knowledge for single-discipline courses.

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Allow opportunities for students to apply theory

Learning business and management subjects and requiring students to apply their knowledge in a simulated environment does not always foster deep learning. Applying theory through experiential learning enables students to observe the application of theory in a variety of business contexts. So, how can this work in practice?

Placement opportunities enable students to interact with a range of operational and decision-making experiences, including with senior decision-makers, allowing them to observe different approaches to management and leadership, while also providing valuable networking opportunities. While placements form the backbone of experiential learning – at Nottingham Business School (NBS), internships are also part of all undergraduate programmes. 

We also facilitate collaborations between all our students and businesses where knowledge flows both ways through student consultancy projects that allow students to interact with local businesses. These organisations set challenges calling for solutions based on data from a variety of sources. Students then analyse problems and synthesise possible scenarios. 

For example, a group of NBS undergraduates from across accounting and finance, economics, marketing and management programmes participated in a carbon management consultancy advising a local engineering firm on how to further cut their carbon footprint. The company had already taken steps such as swapping PC towers for laptops that used less energy but found it challenging to find the next significant step in their sustainability actions. The students offered several recommendations, such as replacing energy-intensive lightbulbs and implementing facility improvements to reduce energy waste which could lower electricity-related carbon emissions by about 7 per cent and reduce costs. After implementing this recommendation, the company noted a 20 per cent saving in its monthly electricity bills. 

Opportunities for experiential learning like this are crucial if we want to produce graduates with the desire and competency to serve local and global communities. It is important to encourage students to interact with these communities as soon as they start their studies at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Tailor learning to individual students

Shaping students into leaders who will invest time and resources into bettering communities requires us to demonstrate that we as business schools are invested in them as individuals. This can be achieved in a number of ways, but a face-to-face approach should be the basis of any student support strategy. For example, this could involve assigning a course tutor or academic mentor to each student to identify key strengths, goals and areas for development. These mentors can assist students in identifying option modules that would benefit them most and internships or extracurricular opportunities that equip them with skills and experiences that will help them achieve their ambitions.

Tutors should also use technology in this process. Student-related analytics and AI provide ways to analyse how quickly students are progressing towards their desired outcomes. For instance, AI tools can generate quizzes and track students’ performance. Based on the analytics the AI creates, tutors can tailor support and guide students who may be struggling academically or in their personal lives to access extra support.

This ensures that students learn content relevant to their ambitions at a speed that suits them. These are important steps for business schools to take if we are to help students maximise their potential as individuals in the age of AI and digitalisation. 

To do the above at any scale requires an organised framework, and investment in technology, people and processes. 

Baback Yazdani is the executive dean of Nottingham Business School (NBS), part of Nottingham Trent University.