B873 / BXY873 Effective Strategy Management

This school aims to provide students with an opportunity to bring to life the strategic management concepts seen in the module. In addition, it seeks to develop relevant soft skills that we expect are useful not only for their studies but also their professional life.

Use of IT and online collaboration is integrated into the module work. Students will have considerable management experience.

Residential school tutor role

The three-day (two-night) school is designed to develop skills and to reinforce, extend and integrate understanding of module materials. The programme has three key components:

• video cases covering the breadth of topics in the module, which serve as the basis for a number of small team activities;
• creation and presentation of a business model to integrate the knowledge of the module and prior activities carried out at the residential school;
• networking and development of additional soft skills.

Tutoring is facilitative, helping students to link school activities to module concepts and to develop soft skills. The video cases have been recorded with three MBA alumni working for real life businesses and public service organisations and have been specially devised for the school.

You will be responsible for facilitating the work of a team of around 12 students as they work with the cases and perform different analyses in small sub-teams. You will also facilitate a session where the students will pitch a business model idea to you and their fellow peers.

Your role will be to guide students through the process of applying relevant module concepts to the issues presented throughout the residential school. As the students will work with interactive material on the module website and elsewhere, you will need to work flexibly with them on the material they have identified.

Residential school tutor qualifications

You should have a postgraduate qualification in management, or a relevant professional qualification, and experience of management and management development. Good facilitation skills are essential.

This residential school will require students to understand strategy in different contexts and therefore it will be a requirement of the role for tutors to have sufficient understanding of working across sectors (e.g. public, private and not-for-profit) to direct and facilitate such analyses and discussions.

Another key component of the school will be that students will be required to research online material and as tutor you should be comfortable with online researching and the use of ICT.

Online school tutor role

The online version of the school provides an equivalent to the face-to-face residential school for students unable to attend a residential venue, or who prefer the online option. Please note that given the current COVID-19 situation that the world is facing the online residential school will be the only alternative offered to students during the 21E presentation of the module.

Participants in the online residential school enjoy the opportunity to work with their fellow peers in a series of small team activities that replicate those of the face-to-face version and that you will facilitate in online forums and synchronous sessions. The online school runs over a period of 18 days in which all discussion and activities are conducted online.

As with the face-to-face school, your role as a tutor is to enable students to improve their soft skills and to explore the use and analysis of the module’s concepts. You will support a group of students in a sequence of online sessions that require them to participate in specified tasks where collaborative learning is a central aim. You should expect to comment on the performance of the group, and you will report to an online Module Director about progress, achievements and problems.

Full guidance and details of your tasks and role will be given to you in advance.

To tutor the online version, you will need ready access to a computer that at least matches the OUBS specification with broadband connection. You can check the computer specification at Personal Computing for OU study - B873

You will be required to log on and contribute every day, for up to one hour a day, for the period of the school. You will need to spend some time preparing one week prior to the start of the school to introduce yourself to your student group and to ensure they are carrying out their preparatory work.

Online school tutor qualifications

In addition to the qualifications for the residential school set out above, you must have demonstrable experience in online teaching or e-moderation in any context, e.g. online module tuition of OU Business School student groups or other work such as project management in a virtual environment.

You will be committed to and believe in the online environment as an effective means of tuition and learning, and will be able to promote the medium and the success of virtual groups as a key management skill for students.

All residential school appointments

Preference will be given to OUBS academic staff, B873 module tutors and others who have successfully tutored previously.