Facilitating student engagement and collaboration in a large postgraduate course using wiki-based activities

This paper investigates the impact of wiki-based activities on student participation and collaborative learning in a large postgraduate international management course. The wiki was used in this study as a facilitator for engagement and collaboration rather than a means of online discussions. Based on both qualitative and quantitative data, we find strong evidence that the use of the wiki facilitated student engagement and collaboration, both inside and outside the classroom. Moreover, student learning had significantly improved as a result of the enhanced learning environment.

Critical Reflection in the Marketing Curriculum

This article examines how we can encourage students to engage critically with marketing ideas and activities. Critical marketing studies are currently on the margins of the discipline, and the ideas and challenges to conventional marketing studies posed by critical scholars are rarely tested or implemented in the marketing classroom. Often these are perceived as too academic and elitist to be relevant to the modern business environment. Drawing largely from debates in the management education literature, this article discusses the problems and possibilities of introducing critical reflection into the marketing curriculum and describes some strategies for encouraging critique in the marketing classroom.

Management and engineering education in the 1950s and 1960s

The career destiny of many graduate engineers is in industry. Quite how well prepared they were for that career became a matter of political importance in the late 1950s and early 1960s as the issue of Britain's relatively poor economic performance grew in salience. This article looks at this preparation with particular reference to management training. It examines the attitudes of those parties most interested in engineering education ‐ the government, industry, the engineering institutions and the educators themselves. All of these saw management training as being part of the formation of at least a portion of professional engineers at some stage in their career. But there was no general agreement between them about what this should consist of or when it should be provided. At the same time broader changes in engineering education were taking place which cut across and to some extent militated against attempts to enhance the role of management training. The result, it is argued, is that by the end of the 1960s little progress had been achieved.