2017

Pedagogical innovation: hybrid courses and cross-cultural friction 

There was a lot of educational innovation in 2017 and a new course format that hit the mark. The new sequence put the students in contact with a “professor / consultant” duo – in this case from Orange – for a double analysis of agile processes. As with corporate visits, Olga Kapitskaia was keen to balance academic and operational approaches: “It’s exciting because the students move from theory to practice immediately and learn about models that are developing almost under their eyes.” The International Masters would not be what they are without this ability to produce innovation in the intercultural field. The director of the International Master’s Degree Courses devotes an important part of her thinking to interculturality each year: “We asked ourselves how to build a really strong intercultural on-the-job training course and came to the conclusion that it was necessary to go beyond purely academic courses and to adopt a set of complementary means. To begin, we worked on a week of induction with a series of intercultural workshops involving students of more than 20 nationalities in our programs. For the projects, in each module of the program, we create small intercultural groups consisting of students with different academic profiles. This compulsory assignment means they leave their comfort zone to enter a genuine working environment as intercultural teams on business topics. For the EIBM program, with our partner El Deusto, we set up a series of remote workshops, dealing with multicultural and multi-site teamwork. In addition, for the second edition of the Intercultural Festival held in November, we let the students take the lead and organize themselves. Finally, we also favored intermingling using one of the School’s hallmarks: CSR. In 2016, we worked with a group of international students on the concept of nudging. They made proposals to improve the day-to-day life on the Audencia campus from the CSR perspective and reflected on how to transfer these approaches across cultures. This year we had bigger ambitions and thanks to the CSR expertise of Professors Céline Louche and Jennifer Goodman, we organized a two-day seminar for all IMM students on a topic of plastic management in the world, benefitting from their multiculturalism and their ability to innovate, while insisting on the negotiation needed between stakeholders.”