Stefan Berger | Faces of FEB

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The Faculty of Economics and Business is a faculty with a great diversity of people who all have an impact, big or small, on science and society. But who are these people? Within ‘Faces of FEB’ we connect with different students, staff members and researchers of the faculty and give a little peek into their world. This month: Stefan Berger, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior, who has implemented some innovative ideas in his teaching.

1. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

I joined the UG in January this year after having worked at the University of St.Gallen in Switzerland for 7 years. I now work as an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Department of HRM&OB.

The overarching goal of my research is to advance knowledge on human collaboration in a work context. Such collaboration is generally considered to occur in teams that are conceptualized as “typically stable, usually full-time, and well-defined” - an archetype that I believe is increasingly outdated and unrealistic when looking at teamwork in organizational practice. In my work, I thus seek to expand collaboration research into team arrangements that are unstable, part-time, and ill-defined.

I teach courses mainly on the Master level, including Work Design & Team Processes, Leadership, and Research Skills. Besides, I supervise several Master Thesis projects on topics related to modern team arrangements.

2. Recently you implemented the idea to use podcasts instead of powerpoints during classes. How did you come up with this?

I used the podcasting assignment in a course on “Work Design & Team Processes”. As part of the group assignment, students identify a gap in the existing literature and formulate an exploratory research question. Then, they interview practitioners in order to come up with answers to their questions. In previous years, they first pitched this idea in a presentation (using PPT) and then summarized their findings in a short report. Now, I am not a big fan of student PPT presentations, because, first, I think that we use them too frequently in our teaching and, second, they usually do not differ a lot from writing a paper: same logic and structure, usually very much about ticking one box after the other, and at best somewhat engaging and entertaining.

So, we thought about ways to harness the students’ creativity and, at the same time, have a little fun with the exercise. We discussed all sorts of options, including poster presentations (again used too much probably), creating videos (quite challenging because of the equipment needed), and eventually had the idea to have them create podcasts. How did we come up with it? I am a big fan of podcasts and listen to several of them very regularly, for example when driving to the University. So, I thought why not explore this for teaching.

We first had some concerns about the technical feasibility of creating a podcast with no budget and little time. I then reached out to the FEB podcast team who were very helpful in the sense that they provided us with useful links and information. I then compiled all of this together and we felt ready to go.

3. How did your students experience the podcast assignment?

I think they felt a bit overwhelmed in the first place, although most of them confirmed that they listen to podcasts regularly. However, after an intensive preparation session of 45 minutes, where I provided a list of resources, such as helpful tutorials, ideas on how to structure and organize a podcast, as well as links to, for example, databases with royalty-free music, I felt a bit more optimism in the room. What was very interesting then: I expected that I would have to answer tons of questions about this, but - in fact - only one group reached out to me during the preparation asking if they could make a podcast longer than the 10-12 minutes that I set as the limit. When we then listened to the first podcasts, the quality and professionalism of the podcasts exceeded our wildest expectations.

We then asked students to listen to a random selection of other podcasts and grade them. The peer-evaluation was very realistic and thus used as the final grade for the podcasts. Moreover, we had a winner’s ceremony in which the best three teams (based on student ratings) were awarded a certificate and the winning group received Spotify vouchers to listen to their favorite podcasts without advertisement ;-)

In our final meeting, I also did a debriefing including a formal evaluation of the podcasting assignment: Students liked the podcasting assignment a lot and especially significantly preferred them over PPT. Moreover, they did not feel overstrained with the assignment at all. Also, lots of colleagues from this and other universities reached out to me asking for the slides and materials we used. That was nice to see and we are happy to share all of this, of course.

4. Your innovative ideas do not go unnoticed, as you even received a teaching innovation grant for another course. What are you planning to do with this?

The teaching innovation grant is for my course on Research Skills, in which I prepare Master students for writing an empirical Master thesis. In previous semesters, this was a pure classroom course, with the teacher covering the main topics and an exercise here and there. As part of the grant, I am fully revising this setup: All content and process related knowledge is now covered in around 40-50 short knowledge clips that students can watch at their own pace and needs. The freed up time during the tutorials is now used for challenge-oriented learning: Together with my colleagues, I identified the 5 main challenges that students face when writing their thesis and, in each of the tutorials, work actively on these challenges with the students. This goes from “how to structure the introduction” or “how to write a hypothesis” to “how to prepare a messy dataset” etc. A nice side-effect is that other teachers at our department (and potentially faculty) can also use these videos and therefore save a lot of time and energy in explaining the same things over and over again. But let us wait for the evaluation after the semester… ;-)