15: Teaching Business by Doing Business: An Interdisciplinary Faculty–Friendly Approach

Abstract

This chapter describes theimplementation ofan interdisciplinary undergraduate curricular innovation in two different university settings. TheIntegrative Business Experience (!BE) requires students to enroll concurrently in three required core business courses and apracticum course in which theydevelop andoperate a startup business (based on a real-money loan of up to $5,000) and carry out a hands-on community service project. This chapter also reports outcomes for students (including data from an assessment), examines the variables that minimizethedifficulty ofachieving cross-disciplinary integration in IBE, andsuggests keys to enabling faculty-friendly integrative course designs in other settings. F aculty at postsecondary institutions face an ongoing dilemma based on the fact that academia is organized around discipline-based academic courses and departments while "Simply put: life is interdisciplinary" (DeZure, 1999, p. 1). On the one hand, faculty are trained within disciplines and, as a result, are seldom academically equipped to teach interdisciplinary courses unless they engage in and incur the costs that typically accompany any form of team-teaching. These include the additional time required for jointly developing plans for both dealing with the course content and evaluating student performance (Eby, 2001) anqadjusting to student needs as the course unfolds (Harris & Harvey, 2000). In addition, many members of Information Systems Principles of~lanagemenl Principles of~Iarketing +IBE I'racticum (counts as upper-level elective) Onestand-alone course