Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Key Words Teaching and learning HRM, Experiential exercises, HRM functions, Student
learning
Context This course was actually designed and delivered among several full- and part-
time master’s level students in business & management; especially those studying
HRM and HRD in two of the top Iranian management schools.
This course was designed for attendees who did not have a positive attitude
toward HRM and its practicality. The attitudes were more technical and hard
rather than soft toward human resources. One objective for the instructor was to
impact the student's attitude toward HRM.
The exercises are designed in a way that students can not complete it without fully
reading and understanding the course readings and materials.
Purpose The objective of the course is to enhance student learning and mastery of “Human
Resource Management” functions using experiential and live-case exercises.
How it works Students are divided into groups at the beginning of the semester
(see appendix 1 for an activity to assign students into groups).
Students are required to work on the following exercises
throughout the course in their groups (See appendix 2 for a
sample of 6 exercises).
A template is designed to accompany each exercise with the
purpose of informing students about the scores devoted to each
exercise and also providing some guidelines to help student
understand the scoring criteria. The instructor may teach HRM
1
functions based on the book "Human Resource Management" by
Gary Dessler in the first two third of each session. Then, groups
can be asked to start working on the exercise relevant to the topic
discussed in the class and finish and deliver it by the next session
(next week).
2
in their course book and listen to the lecture on the training
carefully to be able to complete this exercise.
Exercise 6 (Performance assessment):
The groups would try to design a performance appraisal method
Exercise 7 (career path):
Students are asked to design a career path for the specific job
they chose within the company.
Exercise 8 (compensation and benefits):
Students are asked to select from the compensation methods and
design a compensation and benefit package for the job they
selected.
The instructor and the teaching assistants may go through all the
assignments and give feedback to the groups. The instructor may devote
portions of class time to students to briefly present the progress of their
work in the class.
Evaluation/Feedback “Innovative Live-case HRM Training Course” was implemented at two
Iranian universities during fall 2011.
Students from six management master’s level HRM courses and one
master’s level HRD course at University of Tehran and students from
one MBA course at Sharif University of Technology were taking an
HTM course which used “Innovative Live-case HRM Training” module.
The results of the pre and post test showed significant increase in
student knowledge about all functions of human resource management
and their attitude toward human resource development.
3
Appendices
All the students are asked to write the answer to the four following questions on an index card:
3. When working in a team what are two of the main contributions you can make?
4. When working in a team what are two of the main shortcomings you have?
The students don’t need to put their name on the index card; instead they are asked to write a secret code
on it. The instructor collects the index cards and reads the code and the answers on each index card
aloud. Students are instructed to write down the codes they like to choose as a teammate. Then students
are asked to stand-up and walk round the class and find out who the codes they selected belong to and
negotiate forming their groups.
This activity would give the students some basic information about their classmates and helps the match
between team members. The students may be advised to appreciate diversity and select both males and
female members in their groups.
4
Appendix 2: Exercises
5
After fulfilling the exercise with the participation of each and every member, groups e-mail the
text file to the corresponding class TA.
Note: Scrutinize your selection of the job. Try to select a job, relatively interesting for all
group members, or a job that they are willing to learn and achieve more knowledge about. This
job will be the benchmark for all upcoming exercises, and a careless choice may result in lower
team-work quality, hence mitigate the performance outcome and assessment results.
6
which their selected organization is run. Moreover, the groups must find the required blank templates for
their designed method, by searching the internet, and make them consistent with their selected
organization’s conditions.