Preparing Business Students for a Distributed Workforce and Global Business Environment: Gaining Virtual Leadership Skil
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Preparing Business Students for a Distributed Workforce and Global Business Environment: Gaining Virtual Leadership Skills in an Authentic Context Susan Loucks 1 & Gamze Ozogul 1
# Association for Educational Communications & Technology 2020
Abstract There is an increased demand for a skilled workforce that is prepared for work in today’s digital economy, which is often done in virtual teams. Thus, while many students today have little or no experience working in this mode, they are often placed in virtual teams early in their careers. We argue that that if students have the opportunity to acquire virtual leadership skills in an authentic setting in their undergraduate program, they will be more prepared when they are placed in virtual teams and virtual leadership roles in the workplace. An instructional strategy was implemented in a large online undergraduate business course to provide students with the experience of working in virtual teams in an authentic setting and the findings of the study highlight the importance of organization, technology management, communication, managing student perceptions, and coaching when using this strategy to teach virtual leadership and virtual team skills. Keywords Authentic . Leadership . Online learning . Situated learning . Virtual teams
The growth of online education has been driven by the emergence of new technologies and an increasing demand for a skilled workforce in a digitalized economy (Kumar et al. 2017), in which much of the work is done by virtual teams (Schmidt 2014) and effective leadership plays a critical role (Fan et al. 2014). Thus, to adequately prepare students to succeed in the new economy, instructors need to find ways to teach them to work in and lead virtual teams. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to investigate an instructional strategy which provides students with an opportunity to work in virtual teams and practice virtual leadership skills in an authentic setting so they will be prepared when they undertake these roles in the workplace.
* Susan Loucks [email protected] Gamze Ozogul [email protected] 1
Indiana University, 1309 E. Tenth Street, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA
Literature Review Online Learning and Authentic Learning Strategies Online learning in higher education in the United States continues to grow in popularity. As reported by Seaman et al. (2018), 6.4 million students took an online distance education course in 2016, an annual growth rate of 5.6%, which was up from 3.9% the previous year. This increase in the number of students in online courses benefits universities due to lower costs (Bowen et al. 2014), and researchers have found that students perform equally well in online and face-to-face courses (Allen et al. 2016; Wisneski et al. 2017). However, instructors face challenges managing and teaching online courses, especially those courses with high enrollments, often exceeding 70 students (Trammell and LaForge 2017). Among the challenges instructors have reported are assessment and grading, giving ne
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