AN EVIDENCE OF THE APPLICATION OF CDIO TECHNIQUE FOR UNDERGRADUATES’ BUSINESS COMMUNICATION PROJECT

Abstract

The New Academic Learning Initiative (NALI) promotes many advance and unique learning strategies that can be applied by academician in order to make learning becomes of undergraduates at higher education more engaging and significant. During the Covid-19 pandemic, all traditional teaching methods have been converted into online medium. As such, many of the course works need to be adjusted to incorporate the new norms of teaching approaches. This study provides an anecdote of students’ reflections on conducting their Business Communication project using CDIO technique (Conceiving, Designing, Implementing, Operating). CDIO is one of NALI’s technique which is popular among engineering students. The technique has been widely implemented in 116 schools or institutions worldwide. In this study two groups of year three accounting undergraduates at Azman Hashim International Business Schools (AHIBS), UTM had conducted their group project using CDIO approach. The project theme is based on business scenarios during Covid-19. Each group of students were sub-divided into 8 groups of five people. They were required to design a storyline that consists of 8 drama scenes which later edited and synchronised into one big story. Due to Covid-19, students were dispersedly located at their homes thus, their discussions on the overall concept, design, implementation and operation of the project were done online from a distance. Findings from this study reveal many positive responses from students who expressed their excitement, deep learning experiences and overall satisfaction in executing the Business Communication project. The limitation of the study is that the experiment was done on two groups of year three accounting students, hence no comparison of data can be made to provide more insights on the learning tool.