Dr. David Sutherland, MBA lecturer at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business, was looking for a better way to engage students.
Since students in the Pro MBA program have full-time day jobs, Sutherland wanted to be able to facilitate learning between sessions.
Using Salesforce Chatter, Dr. Sutherland distributed assignments to students, who formed teams and were able to collaborate with each other to complete the assignment. Students were able to browse other teams’ Chatter groups to come up with new ideas and build more robust solutions. Chatter reduced the dependence on email and became an important component for grading classroom participation.
The outcome? A 54% increase in learning objectives achieved by students. And 88% of students said Chatter was a significant contributor to their learning in the course.
Chatter created the platform for open innovation and served as an educational delivery form that was easily adopted by students. There was
no training needed. And Chatter was flexible enough to adapt to different learning styles.
“As universities go more into online education, it needs to be more social. They need to form communities. Education is social. When you
recognize this, the learning outcomes are higher,” said Dr. Sutherland.
