Exploratory Learning Environments for Responsible Management Education Using Lego Serious Play

Research into responsible management education has largely focused on the merits, attributes, and transformation opportunities to enhance responsible business school education aims. As such, a prominent part of the literature has occupied itself with examining if responsible management modules are inherently considered a non-crucial element of the curriculum and determining the extent to which business schools have introduced such learning content into their curriculum. However, there has been scant research into how to apply novel teaching approaches to engage students and promote responsible management education endeavours. As such, this paper seeks to address this gap through the development of a teaching framework to support educators in designing effective learning environments focused on responsible management education. We will draw on constructivist learning theories and Lego Serious Play (LSP) as a learning enhancement approach to develop a pedagogical framework. LSP is selected due to its increasing application in learning environments to help promote critical discourse, and engage with highly complex problems, whether these are social, economic, environmental, or organisational.

The educator’s LSP journey: creating exploratory learning environments for responsible management education using Lego Serious Play

Research into responsible management education has largely focused on the merits, attributes, and transformation opportunities to enhance responsible business school education aims. As such, a prominent part of the literature has occupied itself with examining if responsible management modules are inherently considered a non-crucial element of the curriculum and determining the extent to which business schools have introduced such learning content into their curriculum. However, there has been scant research into how to apply novel teaching approaches to engage students and promote responsible management education endeavours. As such, this paper seeks to address this gap through the development of a teaching framework to support educators in designing effective learning environments focused on responsible management education. We draw on constructivist learning theories and Lego Serious Play (LSP) as a learning enhancement approach to develop a pedagogical framework titled The Educator’s LSP Journey. LSP is chosen due to its increasing application in learning environments to help promote critical discourse, and engage with highly complex problems, whether these are social, economic, environmental, or organisational. Therefore, this paper contributes to the responsible management education discourse by providing educators with a practical methodology to support student engagement and co-creation of knowledge by fostering exploratory learning environments and enriching the practices of active learning communities.

Plan Recognition for Exploratory Learning Environments Using Interleaved Temporal Search

This article presents new algorithms for inferring users’ activities in a class of flexible and open-ended educational software called exploratory learning environments (ELE). Such settings provide a rich educational environment for students, but challenge teachers to keep track of students’ progress and to assess their performance. This article presents techniques for recognizing students activities in ELEs and visualizing these activities to students. It describes a new plan recognition algorithm that takes into account repetition and interleaving of activities. This algorithm was evaluated empirically using two ELEs for teaching chemistry and statistics used by thousands of students in several countries. It was able to outperform the state-of-the-art plan recognition algorithms when compared to a gold-standard that was obtained by a domain-expert. We also show that visualizing students’ plans improves their performance on new problems when compared to an alternative visualization that consists of a step-by-step list of actions.