Modules such as “Corporate Governance, Business Law, Ethics” in The UCLA — NUS EMBA programme are challenging. Most of the students tend not to have a legal background, and may not have much experience dealing with ethical dilemmas at the board level.
According to the programme’s academic director, Associate Professor Lan Luh Luh, “The EMBA students, who tend to be regional managers, section heads or entrepreneurs, might not be able to relate to the governance-related issues that shareholders and board directors face.”
“They also may not be familiar with topics such as company laws and legal principles,” added Associate Professor Lan, who has been teaching corporate governance to MBA and EMBA students for more than ten years.
Associate Professor Lan's corporate governance class on zoom
In a regular semester, the students from around the world would have travelled to Singapore for the class. Other stops in the 15-month-long programme would have been Los Angeles, Bangalore, New Delhi, Shenzhen and Shanghai.
Due to travel restrictions brought on by COVID-19, the students are joining remotely, logging in for four hours over four consecutive weekends. This means having tired students log in from the US after work on Fridays and Asian students to sacrifice their Saturday and Sunday mornings.
Making such topics resonate with its audience is already challenging at the best of times. Now add the additional level of difficulty of doing so remotely across multiple time zones.
Instead of just one-way lecturing, I would guide students into a discussion every 15 minutes and let them come up with answers themselves.
Here are the top tips from Associate Professor Lan to make her class as lively as possible.
1) Tailor content to student profiles and ensure case studies are recent and relevant
For UCLA-NUS students who generally are from the US and Asia, I base legal principles on American and English corporate laws and case studies like WeWork and Nissan (Carlos Ghosn). If I am teaching EMBA Chinese students, I would base legal principles on Chinese laws and use companies like Huawei and HSBC in my examples. Students can relate better this way. The EMBA students typically have management experience of at least five years and come from a wide range of industries and cultures. This means that the students can readily share their perspectives and enrich discussions.
2) Mix things up
Instead of just one-way lecturing, I would guide students into a discussion every 15 minutes and let them come up with answers themselves. I have also recorded asynchronous videos for students to watch at various check-points off class to ensure that online class time is devoted to interactive exchanges with the students. Hence, my students must read up and watch the videos before attending my online classes. I understand that online learning can be boring if the students were to watch the static screen for a long time. I have, therefore revamped all my 300+ slides, made them more colourful and use graphs and animations to liven up my content.
3) Be open and humble to feedback
I have invited fellow faculty to sit and give feedback on my online teaching, and one of the feedback I received was that the sessions were too long. For online teaching, I realised that there need to be more breaks, and now I give students short rests (10-20 mins) every hour.
“I hope the students enjoyed the module with the interactions and discussions in class and would like to thank them for staying online with me for four straight weekends,” she said.
