Recommendations for implementing the GIM experience
First and foremost, acknowledging the level of dedication required from a faculty perspective is key to the successful design and implementation of a learning experience such as the one proposed in the GIM. The time and energy investment may be considerably more important during the planning stage and this must be taken into account when forming the team of coordinators and professors at the school leading the experience.
If you are considering implementing the Global Integrative Module Project in your institution, please see the following Table 19 for the Key Steps and details.
We would suggest that schools consider the possibility of gradually implementing the course by beginning with a small-scale pilot edition before moving on to the global experience. In this respect, we suggest starting with a local edition including students from the same school before progressing to an international edition. Depending on the number of faculty available to take part in this experience, one could even consider proposing this as an elective course in one sole programme, and controlling the scope by limiting the number of students participating in the experience.
| KEY STEPS IN THE IMPLEMENTATION | ||||||
| 1st Selection of Coordination Team Internal Planning | 2nd Selection of Academic Team | 3rd Selection of Project Leaders and Business Schools Partners | 4th Selection of Academic Program address | 5th Selection of ePlatform developer | 6th Selection of Tutors | 7th Initial and Follow-up meetings with project leaders |
| Two full time staff members involved in educational innovation |
Faculty member experts in each of the knowledge fields’ students will need to solve the challenge. *It would be positive if they have previously been involved in innovative educational projects |
Faculty members that had been involved in educational innovation and courses dealing with social corporate responsibility or project management | Program modalities that will be incorporated in the project and number of students participating | Open source learning management system (LMS) to ensure ease of implementation and potentiality for access from other Business Schools | One tutor has to be appointed at each Business School whose role was to offer online support to the international teams they had been assigned | Participation of Project Leaders in face-to-face and online distance coordination meetings |
| A part-time project assistant to provide with an essential support in project day-to-day management tasks | Choose schools whose mission refers to training students to become socially responsible leaders | Ensure a similar target of students: number of participants and similar mixture of educational level from each Business School | Tutors will be the first contact with students and have to be available for face-to-face meetings and act as a coach in the case of students from their own business school | |||
Another key condition has to do with whether the school, its students and its faculty is ready to embark on a project that will pull them out of their comfort zone. This was important to bear in mind when identifying and selecting possible partners.
From our perspective and in light of our experience, it is key to manage change gradually, in such a way that the actors involved find the necessary scaffolding to experience the project within their zone of proximal development, thus ensuring the fruitfulness of the experience (Vigotsky, 1978; Zimmerman, 1990). Details of the evolution of the GIM at ESADE is presented in the Appendix F.