Classroom Strategies for Overworked Faculty of Intro to MIS: Harnessing the Power of Cooperative Learning

Many issues complicate the successful academic’s workload, such as declining MIS major enrollments, increased responsibilities, higher publication standards, online teaching, larger class sizes, reduced state funding, and more. On top of this, faculty have a broad selection of teaching methods to learn and choose from with little practical guidance from research or formal doctoral training. In this paper, we present a brief background of some of these methods and then provide simple, easy to implement suggested activities that can be used to increase student interest, engagement, and potentially retention. These activities do not require flipping the classroom or intense training, meaning that busy, overworked faculty could read this article and implement these ideas tomorrow. This paper contributes to research on how to improve the Intro to MIS course through cooperative learning exercises without excessively adding to faculty’s workload. It should especially interest newer faculty looking to supplement traditional lectures in the Intro to MIS course.

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