FACULTY SPOTLIGHT

VSB Faculty Rise to the Challenge

Our faculty continue to demonstrate leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic with innovation, adaptability and forward thinking.

Delivering Real-World Experience in a Pandemic Classroom

Competitive Effectiveness is a required course in which students gain real- world experience through their work on a live case challenge presented by a client. The course averages five sections of 50 students each semester and requires extensive group work, creating a major challenge during the pandemic. VSB faculty came together to adjust the course and to deliver it in multiple ways: in person, remotely via Zoom and hybrid. The course is co-coordinated by Ward Utter, associate chair and professor of practice in the Management & Operations department, and Beth Vallen, PhD, associate professor of Marketing & Business Law. Each section is centered around a case involving a major national brand. Students apply the management skills and frameworks learned in class to manage their work teams; across the semester, each team develops a plan to execute on a marketing prompt given by the client. This normally involves meeting with the client for the case kickoff, multiple coaching sessions, final presentations and a feedback session. During the fall semester, all of the client meetings and many class sessions took place remotely. The biggest goal for the faculty was maintaining the level of student engagement. Some faculty delivered much of the lecture material through asynchronous methods, allowing the in-person sessions to be focused on applying the concepts to real-world scenarios; others ran a more traditional platform, with some students attending class socially distanced and in person, and the other half remotely. Students were encouraged to schedule informal “hangouts” and opportunities to socialize virtually with their teams outside the classroom. This fostered team camaraderie and resulted in increased student engagement. Unique Digital Solutions

When Assistant Professor of the Practice Jeannette-Marie Kelley ’00 MBA first began teaching part-time at VSB nearly 20 years ago, she worked in Silicon Valley during the day and taught MBA courses remotely in the evenings. Kelley credits these early experiences teaching courses online—in addition to constantly growing alongside technology through the years—with helping to ease the abrupt transition to remote learning last year. Since the pandemic began, Kelley has spent hundreds of hours focusing on the optimal utilization of platforms such as Zoom, Blackboard and MediaSite. She has implemented several digital enhancements in her courses to increase student engagement and participation. As Kelley studied and learned how to use each new platform and enhancement, she created reference documents and conducted online trainings for fellow faculty members.

It was important to offer flexibility to the students enrolled as well as the faculty teaching this class. The core content is consistent, but the method of delivery now varies across sections to accommodate our students and faculty.” –Beth Vallen, PhD

PANDEMIC LESSONS

Beth Vallen, PhD

Associate professor, Marketing & Business Law

Ward Utter

Associate chair and professor of practice, Management & Operations

We had to find creative ways to deliver an experience that would result in equivalent learning outcomes for in-person learners and those joining remotely.”

The business world had to quickly reassess the way it normally interacts. Whenever the pandemic is over, I think it's certain there won’t be a 100% return to normal. There will always be a remote component to work, with far less business travel and more video conferencing.”

Jeannette-Marie Kelley ’00 MBA

Assistant professor of practice, Economics and Statistics

In many cases these digital solutions don’t just replace but often improve upon the physical classroom experience, and while things won’t always go as planned, we must remain committed to continued innovation and improvement.”

Kathleen Iacocca, PhD

Assistant professor, Management & Operations

Although text mining analysis is not a traditional way of thinking about contributing to the pandemic, I wanted to get the point across that everyone has a skill that can be used to improve the human condition.”

Using Data Analytics to Make a Difference

The pandemic has created an unprecedented amount of data for researchers in the form of articles, social media posts, expert interviews and medical reports. Kathleen Iacocca, PhD, assistant professor of Management & Operations, saw this as an opportunity for her Advanced Analytics students to discover how analytics could be used to provide real-time insights into a crisis. Dr. Iaccoca challenged students to identify ways companies could use text mining analysis to gain actionable insights. Student responses included health care providers mining medical transcripts to identify pre-existing conditions associated with more severe cases of COVID-19 or to predict patients at greater risk of hospitalization. News agencies could mine social media for insights on the economy, or health insurance companies could mine social media posts to understand the effects of social distancing on mental health and then recommend appropriate support. \v/ Text analysis is a type of data mining which uses software to extract insights, correlations and patterns from large data sets.