Team-taught versus individually taught undergraduate education: A qualitative study of student experiences and preferences

Team teaching is becoming more common in undergraduate programmes of study although the relative merits to the more traditional individually taught courses have not been determined for best practice. For this study, 15 final year undergraduate students were interviewed to gain insight into their learning experiences. A thematic analysis of the interview data identified the perceived advantages and disadvantages of each mode of teaching. The advantages of individually taught courses included: Consistency of content delivery and advice, Familiarity with the lecturer’s teaching style and better Continuity of the subject content. The disadvantage of individually taught modules included Missing knowledge, compared to a team approach. Advantages of team taught modules included: Greater insight into a topic delivered by multiple team members. Disadvantages included: Content overlap, Conflicting messages relating to assessment, team members not taking Ownership of their roles and responsibilities and a belief that overall Team failure is worse than individual failure to deliver a module well. The results revealed that individually taught modules were generally preferred to team taught modules. A set of best practice recommendations are proposed to address the challenges when delivering team-taught teaching and become more student focused

Support or spoon feeding? Research skills training for first year marketing students in a large class

This paper describes the work done by the authors to develop and evaluate a new worksheet and quiz assessment developed to explicitly teach the skills required by marketing students to complete their studies and to be successful professional marketers. While concerns were raised in the teaching faculty that such interventions might amount to spoon feeding, the authors felt that there was sufficient evidence to suggest that such an activity was an effective learning support, especially in such a large first year class. Student survey results indicate that for many students the activity successfully taught a repeatable process of how to find information that would be helpful for current and future research and assignment needs. The authors conclude that the activity was a success and will deploy it again with students, although as an optional rather than mandatory activity