Class Activities
Activities, Projects & Assessment Tools
On this page, you will find descriptions of in-class activities, long-term experiential class projects, games and experiments, assignments, and assessment ideas.
College students are adult learners. While there is a room for abstract lecturing and discussion, adult learners usually learn best by doing, especially when making significant choices in long-term projects. Further, for most learners, learning is highly compartmentalized. They do not spontaneously transfer ideas learned in one domain to another. Accordingly, if we want students to apply business ethics concepts to real-life decisions, as much as possible we want to have them make those kinds of decisions in class in a structured learning environment.
The Ethics Project is simple: Students, working in groups, are asked to “Think of something good to do, and do it.” What they do is their choice, but they must justify every decision before their peers. Each group is granted $1000 from funds from the Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics.
Unlike case studies or role-playing exercises, this project requires students to take responsibility for their own decisions, face genuine risks and uncertainty, anticipate and overcome genuine challenges, cut through red tape, and coordinate action. Instead of discussing hypothetical business ethics or managerial challenges, students experience real challenges first-hand. Instead of following orders, students lead.
Students write a report and make a presentation answering a series of ten questions. These questions require them to plan and evaluate their project using the tools of philosophy, economics, psychology, and management theory. Questions include: How did you define good, and why? Did you add value to the world, considering the costs of your project? (This question requires them to commensurate the value of their outputs with the value of their inputs.) What obstacles did you expect to encounter and what obstacles did you in fact encounter? What were your opportunity costs? Did you succeed or fail, and by what standards should we judge you?
Student projects have ranged from the profound to the mundane. For instance, some students helped teenage girls in Africa start a plant-oil business that allowed them to support themselves and their families. Others started a non-profit, Unsung Heroes, which worked to recognize the value of “blue-collar staff” and provided monetary support to help them realize their dreams. Unsung Heroes received extensive national news coverage, including being featured on NBC’s Nightly News with Lester Holt. It later became a club with chapters at multiple universities. Others started a screen repair business that grossed six figures. Others repaired water heaters in their dormitories and saved the university thousands of dollars in water costs. Others successfully lobbied the university to modify its policies to allow international students to remain on campus over winter break. Others raised $16,500 and then sent three truckloads of supplies to victims of the Mocoa mudslide disaster.
Click here to read a Journal of Business Ethics Education article about the Ethics Project. Click here to see a successful example of the project being implemented at another university.
Click here for further instructions on how to implement and grade the Ethics Project.
The Business Project is a semester-long business simulation project. Students create a hypothetical business and role-play strategic choices. Their choices in turn lead to a final ethics dilemma that results from these choices.
The basic idea is that students, working in groups, are asked to devise and defend the viability of a mock business. Students then make a serious of decisions for that company, such as devising a marketing campaigning, developing a corporate social responsibility statement, analyzing the regulations that might apply to it, critiquing competitors, or anything else the instructor finds of value and interest to their course. (The Business Project is modular; it can be expanded, contracted, or modified per the course needs.) All along the way, at each stage, students should consider the ethical challenges a business like theirs would face and explain how they would realistically manage the business to avoid or overcome those challenges. Finally, at the end of the semester, each group is presented with a custom-made dilemma, a dilemma based upon flaws or risks in their business-design or previous choices. Each group must then try to solve that dilemma.
While the Business Project is a simulation, it improves upon traditional case studies in many ways. For one, because students create their own business, they invest in it intellectually and emotionally. It matters to them the way a role-playing game character might. Second, because they make the decisions, any dilemmas or problems that would arise are their own making. The project helps students see how good-natured people like themselves might back into a legal or ethical problem, and it helps train them to avoid doing so.
Click here for a detailed description of how to run the Business Project. This includes a template for constructing dilemmas and examples of dilemmas we have assigned to students.
Click here for descriptions of one-shot, in class activities, including psychological experiments, economic games, sales activities, and other learning activities.
Class Assessments & Assignments
Sick of assigning case studies and essays? Looking for something novel? Click here for novel ideas for graded class assignments, including critiques of existing companies, op-ed writing, experimental design, problem-spotting and problem solving, charity auctions, and more.