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AbstractPopular game shows offer educators the opportunity to develop active‐learning exercises that provide students with a real‐world connection to analytical reasoning and methods. We describe a classroom assignment developed for quantitative business courses based on the Monty Hall Problem (MHP), a probability puzzle with ties to the long‐running television game showLet's Make a Deal. Through a holistic view of the MHP, we provide instructors with various avenues to use the MHP as a comprehensive experiential learning exercise with multiple opportunities for individual and class discussions and exercises. Instructors adopting our multifaceted approach to the MHP will expose students to myriad analytical tools including probability, decision trees, and Monte Carlo simulation as well as to cognitive biases that can affect the decision‐making process. Among the unique contributions of our work is its focus on the commonly held MHP assumptions. Specifically, we challenge students to articulate conditions inherent to the MHP solution and assess their appropriateness in context. By relaxing one or more of those assumptions, and observing differences in solutions, students become attuned to the importance of knowing and assessing conditions that underlie all quantitative decision‐making tools.

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the development and delivery of online courses for the executive education audience. The goal is to introduce a new framework, the technical/strategic paradigm, that will help educators to identify the pedagogical needs of disparate executive groups and adjust their online course development plans accordingly. We describe how four key elements of online courses (course structure, content‐based learning materials, assignments, and learning assessment) should be fashioned in a way that honors the technical or strategic focus of the learning environment. How the technical/strategic paradigm molds well with many different types of executive educational audiences and settings is illustrated. Course developers seeking advice on how to put these ideas into practice will find lists of resources and implementable recommendations. Ultimately, we argue that some of the pitfalls that faculty experience when transitioning from a traditional business school environment to an online executive education environment can be attributed to a misunderstanding of the degree to which students expect technical versus strategic content.

ABSTRACTThis article describes a predictive model that assesses whether a student will have greater perceived learning in group assignments or in individual work. The model produces correct classifications 87.5% of the time. The research is notable in that it is the first in the education literature to adopt a predictive modeling methodology using data collected via a designed experiment. All subjects experienced both a collaborative and an individual assignment, thus mitigating uncontrolled external factors in the measurement of differences in perceived learning. The exploratory nature of the work prompted the use of Partial Least Squares Regression for estimation. The work serves as an illustration of how predictive modeling might enlighten those in educational and academic settings.

ABSTRACTFaculty teaching in online environments are universally encouraged to incorporate a variety of student‐to‐student learning activities into their courses. Although there is a body of both theoretical and empirical work supporting this, adult professional students participating in an online MBA program at an urban business school reported being at best indifferent and often negative regarding these learning activities. A case study was performed to explore how pervasive this attitude was and the possible reasons for it. Through various sources of data and exploration, we discovered that common interactive modalities are not associated with either perceived learning or satisfaction. A content analysis of a data analysis course revealed that 64.5% of responses recalled student‐to‐student interactivities when responding to a "learned least from" query. We identified three possible reasons for these negative responses: time inefficiency, interaction dysfunction, and flexibility intrusion. We conclude that, although some working professional students probably do learn from student‐to‐student interactivity, the costs incurred may be too great. If working adult students present a different profile than those students typically represented in academic research and thus have different needs and expectations, we may need to rethink the design of online education delivered to them.