aaron's blog

One unique part of the Ohio State University culture is the Business Builders Club (BBC). The club, which sits apart from the business school, focuses on building a foundation for entrepreneurship for OSU students. Since its founding in 2000, the club has developed a reputation for developing innovative and successful businesspeople and has become a differentiator for OSU. Although the BBC is primarily geared toward undergraduates, I “sneaked in” to the first meeting of the year this past Tuesday.

Sandy Blanquera, the keynote speaker, told a remarkably personal story of her own journey from corporate employee, to franchisee, to entrepreneur. She now owns and operates the Columbus-based social marketing company, Social Boomerang. Additionally, Sandy and her husband are very active in the Columbus entrepreneur community. In fact, on her recommendation I joined TechLife Columbus: a group focused on technology, entrepreneurship, education and “accelerating the pace of getting to know really cool tech people in town.”

Although I have only been an active member TechLife Columbus for a few days now, I already got the opportunity to attend an event—a social event at the economic development and incubator facility, TechColumbus. From these two events my excitement for the entrepreneur community in Columbus has grown immensely, and I am looking forward to getting more involved with both organizations.

Reposted from Fisher Grad Life Blog.

A

As I print thirty pages of PowerPoint slides for my courses this week, I can’t help but wonder when PowerPoint became such an integral part of the classroom experience.

At the risk of sounding nostalgic (or curmudgeon-like), I am forced to think back to my undergrad experiences. As an engineering student, I only took a handful of courses that utilized PowerPoint as a teaching tool and I occasionally used it as an aid for my own oral presentations. However, it was far from a standard part of every classroom.

But flash forward just five years, and (at least in the business school) there is a projector in every room and four out of my five MBA courses are taught primarily using PowerPoint. I’m not sure what to think of it. It does seem to be pretty effective and some instructors have found innovative ways to teach using the medium: one instructor encourages “active learning” by distributing slides with blanks in the places of key terms and ideas—as we cover the material in class we are encouraged to fill in the blanks.

Are there any thoughts on the use of PowerPoint as a teaching technique? Have instructors lost the ability to lecture or lead a discussion without a using it as crutch? Or is it’s pervasiveness an indicator of its effectiveness?

Reposted from Fisher Grad Life Blog.

A

…so far so good.

As you might expect, the first week of classes involved a fair amount of syllabus distribution and “course housekeeping.” But make no mistake we hit the ground running.

Through the miracle of modern technology (specifically Carmen, the online course management tool) we were able to begin our case discussions immediately. In two courses, MBA 812 Managerial Economics and MBA 800 Financial Accounting we read a prepared business case analyses for the first day of class.

This got me thinking that as recently as five years ago (when I was an undergrad) assigning pre-work and distributing syllabi before a course started was much trickier business. It was so tricky in fact, that most instructors avoided it. However, now that there is a central course management tool, material and assignments can be distributed and the instructor can reasonably assume that everyone in the class has all the information.

In addition to my pre-work assignment I spent a fair amount of time this week collecting supplies and books for my five courses. Books and course packets are fairly expensive (read more about that here). However during my trip to Ireland, I was able to built relationships with a few second year students that I was able to leverage to get many of these items used for a considerable discount.

Reposted from Fisher Grad Life Blog.

A